Ventral Caudate and Anterior Insula Recruitment During the Value Estimation of Passionate Rewarding Cues

Abstract

“Wanting”, a component of reward processing, is a motivational property that guides decision making in goal-oriented behavior. This includes behavior aiming at supporting relational bonds, even at the group level. Accordingly, group belongingness works as this motivational property, which is fundamentally different from romantic or maternal love. While primary rewards (or learned associations, such as money) have been largely used to study the conceptual framework associated with “wanting,” other cues triggering behavior, such as passionate motives, are less well-studied. We investigated the neural correlates of value estimation of a passion-driven incentive in neuropsychologically defined football fans. We asked the participants (n = 57) to compute the value of football tickets (the cues that trigger passionate behavior in this “tribal love” context). The trials were all different, comprising tickets for different matches. The participants had no restrictions on the amount to be introduced. This enabled a parametric functional magnetic resonance imaging design based on the explicit estimated value given by the participants in a trial-by-trial approach. Using a whole-brain approach (to prevent biased focus on value-related regions), only the activity in the ventral caudate and left anterior insula showed a critical relationship with the reported value. Higher normalized values led to more activity in the striatum and left insula. The parametric map shows that these regions encode the magnitude of incentive by indexing self-relevant value. Other regions were involved in value computation, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but did not exhibit parametric patterns. The involvement of the nucleus accumbens in value estimation was only found in region of interest -based analysis, which emphasizes the role of the ventral caudate for the presently studied social “reinforcer” cue.