| Summary: | Value-based decision-making is often studied in a static context, where participants decide which option to select from those currently available. However, everyday life often involves an additional dimension: deciding when to select to maximise reward. Recent evidence suggests that agents track the latent reward of an option, updating changes in their latent reward estimate, to achieve appropriate selection timing (latent reward tracking). However, this strategy can be difficult to distinguish from one in which the optimal selection time is estimated in advance, allowing an agent to wait a pre-determined amount of time before selecting, without needing to monitor an option’s latent reward (distance-to-goal tracking). Here we show that these strategies can in principle be dissociated. Human brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG) while female and male participants performed a novel decision task. Participants were shown an option and decided when to select it, as its latent reward changed from trial-to-trial. While the latent reward was uncued, it could be estimated using cued information about the option’s starting value and value growth rate. We then used representational similarity analysis to assess whether EEG signals more closely resembled latent reward tracking or distance-to-goal tracking. This approach successfully dissociated the strategies in this task. Starting value and growth rate were translated into a distance-to-goal signal, far in advance of selecting the option. Latent reward could not be independently decoded. These results demonstrate the feasibility of using high temporal resolution neural recordings to identify internally computed decision variables in the human brain.
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