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Does Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage Really Increase Impulsiveness? Delay and Probability Discounting in Patients with Focal Lesions
- Source :
- J Cogn Neurosci
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- MIT Press - Journals, 2021.
-
Abstract
- If the tendency to discount rewards reflects individuals' general level of impulsiveness, then the discounting of delayed and probabilistic rewards should be negatively correlated: The less a person is able to wait for delayed rewards, the more they should take chances on receiving probabilistic rewards. It has been suggested that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) increases individuals' impulsiveness, but both intertemporal choice and risky choice have only recently been assayed in the same patients with vmPFC damage. Here, we assess both delay and probability discounting in individuals with vmPFC damage (n = 8) or with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage (n = 10), and in age- and education-matched controls (n = 30). On average, MTL-lesioned individuals discounted delayed rewards at normal rates but discounted probabilistic rewards more shallowly than controls. In contrast, vmPFC-lesioned individuals discounted delayed rewards more steeply but probabilistic rewards more shallowly than controls. These results suggest that vmPFC lesions affect the weighting of reward amount relative to delay and certainty in opposite ways. Moreover, whereas MTL-lesioned individuals and controls showed typical, nonsignificant correlations between the discounting of delayed and probabilistic rewards, vmPFC-lesioned individuals showed a significant negative correlation, as would be expected if vmPFC damage increases impulsiveness more in some patients than in others. Although these results are consistent with the hypothesis that vmPFC plays a role in impulsiveness, it is unclear how they could be explained by a single mechanism governing valuation of both delayed and probabilistic rewards.
- Subjects :
- Discounting
medicine.medical_specialty
Cognitive Neuroscience
05 social sciences
Ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Significant negative correlation
Audiology
Affect (psychology)
Intertemporal choice
050105 experimental psychology
Temporal lobe
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
medicine.anatomical_structure
General level
medicine
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
In patient
Psychology
psychological phenomena and processes
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Research Article
delay discounting, episodic future thinking
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15308898 and 0898929X
- Volume :
- 33
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....e11cf9a833463e5abb456f2b15f41739