A neural code supporting prospective probabilistic reasoning for instrumental information demand in humans

When making adaptive decisions, we actively demand information, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms of active information gathering. An open question is how the brain prospectively estimates the information gains that are expected to accrue from various sources by integrating simpler quantities of prior certainty and the reliability (diagnosticity) of a source. We examine this question using fMRI in a task in which people placed bids to obtain information in conditions that varied independently in the rewards, decision uncertainty, and information diagnosticity. We show that, consistent with value of information theory, the participants' bids are sensitive to prior certainty (the certainty about the correct choice before gathering information) and expected posterior certainty (the certainty expected after gathering information). Expected posterior certainty is decoded from multivoxel activation patterns in the posterior parietal and extrastriate cortices. This representation is independent of instrumental rewards and spatially overlaps with distinct representations of prior certainty and expected information gains. The findings suggest that the posterior parietal and extrastriate cortices are candidates for mediating the prospection of posterior probabilities as a key step to anticipating information gains during active gathering of instrumental information.