Related, on the cutting edge: a study in which subjective likability scores for music did not correlate with sales over the next three years, but activity in the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens (while listening to the music) did.

For more such goodies, see the abstracts of papers to be presented this month at the second annual interdisciplinary symposium on decision neuroscience.

One other interesting abstract is from an upcoming paper by Joe Kable, 'Heterogeneity in the Neural Substrates of Time Perception and Time Discounting':

Theoretical and empirical work has demonstrated that important anomalies in intertemporal decision making could arise solely from how individuals perceive the length of future durations. Here we show that the neural processes involved in future time judgments are heterogeneous. In one group of subjects, activity in lateral cortical structures, previously implicated in space and number representation, is positively correlated with the future duration being judged. In another group, activity in medial cortical structures, previously implicated in imagining the future, is negativelycorrelated with duration. These two groups exhibit different behavior: the former judges time linearly and discounts exponentially, while the latter judges time nonlinearly and discounts hyperbolically. The non-linear/hyperbolic group also shows a close correspondence between the medial cortical correlates of duration during future time judgments and the correlates of subjective value during intertemporal decision making. These results suggest that individuals use different cognitive processes to think about future durations, which are differentially linked to behavior and neural activity during time discounting.