Neural evidence for description dependent reward processing in the framing effect

Abstract

Human decision making can be influenced by emotionally valenced contexts, known as the framing effect. We used event-related brain potentials to investigate how framing influences the encoding of reward. We found that the feedback related negativity (FRN), which indexes the "worse than expected" negative prediction error in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), was more negative for the negative frame than for the positive frame in the win domain. Consistent with previous findings that the FRN is not sensitive to "better than expected" positive prediction error, the FRN did not differentiate the positive and negative frame in the loss domain. Our results provide neural evidence that the description invariance principle which states that reward representation and decision making are not influenced by how options are presented is violated in the framing effect.