The context of reinforcement history drastically influences human value-based choices. Mental accounting theory concerns how prior outcomes are perceived, combined and assigned into specific “mental” accounts to influence subsequent decisions but remains agnostic about the underlying computational and neural mechanisms. In a two-stage sequential decision-making task, we found previously incurred costs and bonuses biased subjects’ choices in the opposite directions with similar magnitudes. Such effects were consistent with a computational model where the reference point was recalibrated by prior gains and losses encoded in the ventral striatum activities. Moreover, individual’s susceptibility to prior outcomes was captured by the response of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and its functional connectivity with the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity tracked the value of the chosen option. Our findings provide both behavioral and neural evidence of how sunk costs, benefits, and prospects are integrated within the mental accounting framework to influence choice behavior.

强化历史的背景极大地影响了人类基于价值的选择。心理核算理论关注先前的结果如何被感知、组合和分配到特定的“心理”账户中以影响后续决策，但对潜在的计算和神经机制仍然不可知。在一个两阶段的顺序决策任务中，我们发现先前产生的成本和奖金使受试者的选择在相反方向上具有相似的幅度。这种影响与计算模型一致，其中参考点通过腹侧纹状体活动中编码的先前增益和损失重新校准。此外，背外侧前额叶皮层的反应及其与内侧眶额叶皮层的功能连接性反映了个体对先前结果的敏感性，其活动跟踪所选选项的价值。我们的研究结果为沉没成本、收益和前景如何整合到心理会计框架中以影响选择行为提供了行为和神经证据。