How Interoceptive Awareness Promotes Decision-making: An fMRI study on Neuroforecasting Mobile Games Engagement

Neuroscientists in decision science have advanced an affect-integration-motivation (AIM) framework demonstrating that the neural activity associated with anticipatory affect is predictive of individual behavior and aggregate choice. While traditional psychological theories view aggregate choice as a summation of individual choices, it remains unclear why sampled neural responses can be used to forecast aggregate choices above and beyond sampled individual choices and self-reported affective ratings. We hypothesized that interoceptive awareness may bridge the gap between predicting individual choice and aggregate choice, such that individuals who are better at accessing their bodily sensations are more likely to integrate their physiological responses into decision making, as manifested in consistent self-reporting, behavior, and neural measures jointly forecasting aggregate choice. Therefore, we examined whether participants’ neural responses, choices, and affective ratings forecast download times and revenue from mobile games in app markets, and investigated the role of interoceptive awareness by comparing prediction models from different subgroups of participants. Generally, positive arousal and neural activity in posterior cingulate cortex positively predict individuals’ decisions to download mobile games, whereas individual download choices and sampled affective neural responses (nucleus accumbens, NAcc) forecast aggregate download times. For the high interoceptive sensibility (IS) group, their sampled positive arousal and brain activity associated with positive affect (NAcc) and value integration (medial prefrontal cortex, mPFC) collectively forecasted aggregate download times while, for the low IS group, it was their individual choice that forecasted aggregate download times. Finally, positive arousal robustly predicted aggregate revenue in all groups except for individuals with low interoceptive accuracy. These findings not only support, but also extend the AIM framework by shedding light on the influence of interoceptive awareness on the neurobehavioral mechanisms underlying human decision-making. Keywords: forecasting, interoceptive awareness, fMRI, accumbens, mPFC