Multivariate associations between dopamine receptor availability and risky investment decision making across adulthood

Pharmacological manipulations have revealed that enhancing dopamine increases financial risk taking across adulthood. However, it is unclear whether baseline individual differences in dopamine function, assessed using PET imaging, are related to performance on risky financial decision making tasks. Here, thirty-five healthy adults completed an incentive-compatible learning-based risky investment decision task and a PET scan at rest using [11C]FLB457 to assess dopamine D2-like receptor availability. In the task, participants made choices between a safe asset (bond) and a risky asset (stock) with either an expected value less than the bond ("bad stock") or expected value greater than the bond ("good stock"). Five measures of behavioral performance (choice inflexibility, risk seeking, suboptimal investment) and beliefs (absolute error, optimism) were extracted from the task data and average non-displaceable dopamine D2-like binding potential was extracted from four brain regions of interest (midbrain, amygdala, anterior cingulate, insula) from the PET imaging data. Given the presence of multiple independent and dependent variables, we used canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to evaluate multivariate associations between learning-based decision making and dopamine function controlling for age. Decomposition of the first dimension (r = .76) revealed that the strongest associations were between measures of choice inflexibility, incorrect choice, optimism, amygdala binding potential, and age. Follow-up univariate analyses revealed that amygdala binding potential and age were both independently associated with choice inflexibility. The findings reveal latent associations between baseline neural and behavioral measures suggesting that individual differences in dopamine function may be associated with learning-based financial risk taking in healthy adults.