Multi-areal neural dynamics encode human decision making

Value-based decision-making involves multiple cortical and subcortical brain areas, but the distributed nature of neurophysiological activity underlying economic choices in the human brain remains largely unexplored. Here, we use intracranial recordings from neurosurgical patients to show that risky choices are reflected in high frequency activity distributed across multiple prefrontal and subcortical brain regions, whereas reward-related computations are less widely represented and more modular. State space modeling reveals sub-second neural dynamics underlying choices during deliberation and allows high-accuracy trial-by-trial decoding of subjects’ choices robustly across patients despite differences in anatomical coverage. These results shed light into the neural basis of choice across brain areas and open the door to new intracranial approaches for brain state decoding.