Neural Encoding of Immediate and Instrumental Value During Planning
Journal:
bioRxiv
Published Date:
Mar 3, 2026
Abstract
Planning is a key executive function that enables humans to anticipate future outcomes by mentally simulating action sequences and balancing immediate gains against long-term goals. While we developed a partial understanding of neural mechanisms of planning in spatial navigation and reward-based reinforcement learning, little is known about the relative neural encoding of the instantaneous and instrumental value of the same action. We used a novel fMRI task in which participants repeatedly chose between two options, each with an immediate monetary value and a known future-oriented instrumental value. Our results show that striatal activity is positively correlated with instrumental value, whereas activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and bilateral insula is negatively correlated with the instantaneous value. These dissociable patterns support specialization in valuation neural circuits during planning.
