scholarly journals Dominance Attributions Following Damage to the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (10) ◽  
pp. 1796-1804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Karafin ◽  
Daniel Tranel ◽  
Ralph Adolphs
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Social Dominance ◽  
Reference Group ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Focal Lesions ◽  
Normal Individuals ◽  
Behavioral Impairments

Damage to the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VM) can result in dramatic and maladaptive changes in social behavior despite preservation of most other cognitive abilities. One important aspect of social cognition is the ability to detect social dominance, a process of attributing from particular social signals another person's relative standing in the social world. To test the role of the VM in making attributions of social dominance, we designed two experiments: one requiring dominance judgments from static pictures of faces, the second requiring dominance judgments from film clips. We tested three demographically matched groups of subjects: subjects with focal lesions in the VM (n = 15), brain-damaged comparison subjects with lesions excluding the VM (n = 11), and a reference group of normal individuals with no history of neurological disease (n = 32). Contrary to our expectation, we found that subjects with VM lesions gave dominance judgments on both tasks that did not differ significantly from those given by the other groups. Despite their grossly normal performance, however, subjects with VM lesions showed more subtle impairments specifically when judging static faces: They were less discriminative in their dominance judgments, and did not appear to make normal use of gender and age of the faces in forming their judgments. The findings suggest that, in the laboratory tasks we used, damage to the VM does not necessarily impair judgments of social dominance, although it appears to result in alterations in strategy that might translate into behavioral impairments in real life.

scholarly journals Does Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage Really Increase Impulsiveness? Delay and Probability Discounting in Patients with Focal Lesions

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jenkin N. Y. Mok ◽  
Leonard Green ◽  
Joel Myerson ◽  
Donna Kwan ◽  
Jake Kurczek ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Intertemporal Choice ◽  
Significant Negative Correlation ◽  
Risky Choice ◽  
Probability Discounting ◽  
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
General Level ◽  
Focal Lesions ◽  
Reward Amount

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.

scholarly journals Ventromedial prefrontal cortex is not critical for behavior change without external reinforcement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadav Aridan ◽  
Gabriel Pelletier ◽  
Lesley K Fellows ◽  
Tom Schonberg
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Behavior Change ◽  
Behavioral Change ◽  
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Similar Proportion ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Preference Change ◽  
Focal Lesions ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
External Reinforcement

AbstractCue-approach training (CAT) is a novel paradigm that has been shown to induce preference changes towards items without external reinforcements. In the task the mere association of a neutral cue and a speeded button response has been shown to induce a behavioral change lasting months. This paradigm includes several phases whereby after the training of individual items, behavior change is manifested through binary choices of items with similar initial values. Neuroimaging data have implicated the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) during the choice phase of this task. However, it still remains unclear what are the underlying neural mechanisms during training. Here, we sought to determine whether the ventromedial frontal cortex (VMF) is critical for the non-reinforced preference change induced by CAT. For this purpose, eleven participants with focal lesions involving the VMF and 30 healthy age-matched controls performed the CAT. We found that at the individual level, a similar proportion of VMF and healthy participants showed a preference shift following CAT. The VMF group performed similarly to the healthy age-matched control group in the ranking and training phases. As a group the healthy age-matched controls exhibited a behavior change, but the VMF participants as a group did not. We did not find an association between individual lesion patterns and performance in the task. We conclude that a fully intact VMF is not critical to induce non-externally reinforced preference change and suggest potential mechanisms for this novel type of behavioral change.

scholarly journals Physical Aggressiveness and Gray Matter Deficits in Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Skylan Chester ◽  
Donald Lynam ◽  
Richard Milich ◽  
C. Nathan DeWall
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Gray Matter ◽  
Physical Aggression ◽  
Gray Matter Volume ◽  
Verbal Aggression ◽  
Matter Density ◽  
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Normal Female ◽  
Gray Matter Density ◽  
Normal Individuals

What causes individuals to hurt others? Since the famous case of Phineas Gage, lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) have been reliably linked to physically aggressive behavior. However, it is unclear whether naturally-occurring deficits in VMPFC, among normal individuals, might have widespread consequences for aggression. Using voxel based morphometry, we regressed gray matter density from the brains of 138 normal female and male adults onto their dispositional levels of physical aggression, verbal aggression, and sex, simultaneously. Physical, but not verbal, aggression was associated with reduced gray matter volume in the VMPFC and to a lesser extent, frontopolar cortex. Participants with less gray matter density in this VMPFC cluster were much more likely to engage in real-world violence. These findings suggest that even granular deficits in normal individuals’ VMPFC gray matter can promote physical aggression.

Failure to Learn from Repeated Mistakes: Persistent Decision-Making Impairment as Measured by the Iowa Gambling Task in Patients with Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Lesions

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 927-930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha M. Waters-Wood ◽  
Lin Xiao ◽  
Natalie L. Denburg ◽  
Michael Hernandez ◽  
Antoine Bechara
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Iowa Gambling Task ◽  
Recovery Of Function ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Gambling Task ◽  
Impaired Performance ◽  
Autonomous Recovery ◽  
Over Time

AbstractAlthough frontal patients show impaired decision-making on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), there has been no follow-up study to date to determine whether there is recovery of function over time. We examined neurological participants’ performance on repeated administrations of the IGT over the course of 6 years. We found that, while non-neurological participants showed considerable improvement due to practice effects on the IGT, patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) damage persisted in showing impaired performance on each retest. These results validate the clinical observations that VMPFC dysfunction does not appear to be subject to autonomous recovery over time in real-life. (JINS, 2012, 18, 1–4)

Age differences in ventromedial prefrontal cortex functional connectivity during socioemotional content processing

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (7) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ryan T. Daley ◽  
Holly J. Bowen ◽  
Eric C. Fields ◽  
Angela Gutchess ◽  
Elizabeth A. Kensinger
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Anterior Cingulate ◽  
Supramarginal Gyrus ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Content Processing

Self-relevance effects are often confounded by the presence of emotional content, rendering it difficult to determine how brain networks functionally connected to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are affected by the independent contributions of self-relevance and emotion. This difficulty is complicated by age-related changes in functional connectivity between the vmPFC and other default mode network regions, and regions typically associated with externally oriented networks. We asked groups of younger and older adults to imagine placing emotional and neutral objects in their home or a stranger's home. An age-invariant vmPFC cluster showed increased activation for self-relevant and emotional content processing. Functional connectivity analyses revealed age × self-relevance interactions in vmPFC connectivity with the anterior cingulate cortex. There were also age × emotion interactions in vmPFC functional connectivity with the anterior insula, orbitofrontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and supramarginal gyrus. Interactions occurred in regions with the greatest differences between the age groups, as revealed by conjunction analyses. Implications of the findings are discussed.

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