Neural Encoding of Immediate and Instrumental Value During Planning

Planning is a key executive function enabling humans to anticipate future outcomes by mentally simulating action sequences, balancing immediate gains against long-term goals. However, prior research on planning often conflated it with either spatial navigation or reward-based learning, and little is known about the relative encoding of the immediate 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 (dmPFC) and bilateral insula is negatively correlated with the instantaneous point value. These dissociable patterns support specialization in valuation neural circuits during planning.