"Psychologists and economists have long appreciated the contribution of reward history and expectation to decision-making," begins a brilliant research article in this week's Science. In "matching behavior and the representation of value in the parietal cortex," Stanford University researchers used neuroimaging, neurophysiology and neural computation to understand how "specific histories of choice and reward lead to an internal representation of the 'value' of possible actions."

To understand the ways that sensory input, choice, and decision-making occur in the brain, the researchers placed monkeys in a dynamic foraging environment in which they had to track the changing values of alternative choices through time. They found that a simple model based on reward history (that computationally is close to near-optimal behavior) can duplicate this behavior and that neurons in the parietal cortex represent the relative value of competing action predicted by this model.

As I wrote in "economics from the neurons up," neuroeconomics has a very bright and interesting future. Understanding the neurobiology of decision-making will surely impact our legal system in the years to come, as our understanding of choice, dependency and free will are called into question. This has been a major area of focus of Paul Zak's work on the neurobiology of trust which has been supported by the Gruter Institute over the years.

This line of research has broad societal implications, especially for those who believe we can significantly enhance human performance via neurotechnology. Note the fact that natural monkey behavior correlated well with near-optimal computational models. If it becomes possible to not just enable individuals to achieve a more balanced set of cognitive, emotional and sensory acuities that match the high end of natural performance, but to actually go beyond these bio-evolutionarily defined limits, then we will surely be heading towards a neurosociety where we will be faced with a new driver of social complexity that I call the "perception shift dilemma."

NOTE to email readers: Over the past two months, over 200 of you have joined Brain Waves distribution list. All of the pieces I write on Brain Waves contain a link at the beginning of the email that will take you to a website that not only contains the text of the article but usually five to ten well researched links to supporting information or my previous articles on a subject. For example, click on the above link to get to Brain Waves where there are links to other neuroeconomics articles, background on brain imaging technologies, and pieces I've written on perception shift. Thank you for your continued interest.