scholarly journals Snapping out of Autopilot: Overriding Habits in Real Time and the Role of Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cole Korponay
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Stop Signal Task ◽  
Motor Inhibition ◽  
Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Interoceptive Cues ◽  
Testable Model

Habits allow environmental and interoceptive cues to trigger behavior in an automatized fashion, making them liable to deployment in inappropriate or outdated contexts. Over the long-term, repeated failure of a once adaptive habit to satisfy current goals produces extinction learning that suppresses the habit’s execution. Less attention has been afforded to the mechanisms underlying real-time habit suppression: the capacity to stop the execution of a cued habit that is goal-conflicting. Here, we first posit a model by which goal-relevant stimuli can 1) bring unfolding habits and their projected outcomes into awareness, 2) prompt evaluation of the habit outcome with respect to current goals, and 3) trigger cessation of the habit response if it is determined to be goal-conflicting. Second, we propose a modified stop-signal task to test this model of “goal-directed stopping of habit execution”. Finally, we marshal evidence indicating that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), situated at the nexus of salience detection, action-plan assessment, and motor inhibition networks, is uniquely positioned to coordinate the overriding of habitual behaviors in real time. In sum, this review presents a testable model and candidate neurobiological substrate for our capacity to “snap out of autopilot” and override goal-conflicting habits in real time.

scholarly journals The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in reward valuation and future thinking during intertemporal choice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Ciaramelli ◽  
Flavia De Luca ◽  
Donna Kwan ◽  
Jenkin N. Y. Mok ◽  
Francesca Bianconi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Reward Magnitude ◽  
Intertemporal Choice ◽  
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Future Thinking ◽  
Long Term Outcomes ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Reward Valuation

Intertemporal choices require trade-offs between short-term and long-term outcomes. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) damage causes steep discounting of future rewards (delay discounting; DD) and impoverished episodic future thinking (EFT). The role of vmPFC in reward valuation, EFT, and their interaction during intertemporal choice is still unclear. Here, twelve patients with lesions to vmPFC and forty-one healthy controls chose between smallerimmediate and larger-delayed rewards while we manipulated reward magnitude and the availability of EFT cues. In the EFT condition, participants imagined personal events to occur at the delays associated with the larger-delayed rewards. We found that DD was steeper in vmPFC patients compared to controls, and not modulated by reward magnitude. However, EFT cues downregulated DD in vmPFC patients as well as controls. These findings indicate that vmPFC integrity is critical for the valuation of (future) rewards, but not to instill EFT in intertemporal choice.

Acoustic Features of Rhesus Vocalizations and Their Representation in the Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex

2007 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 1470-1484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yale E. Cohen ◽  
Frédéric Theunissen ◽  
Brian E. Russ ◽  
Patrick Gill
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Acoustic Properties ◽  
Acoustic Features ◽  
Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Communication Signals ◽  
First Order ◽  
Natural Stimuli ◽  
Spectrotemporal Receptive Field ◽  
Auditory Objects

Communication is one of the fundamental components of both human and nonhuman animal behavior. Auditory communication signals (i.e., vocalizations) are especially important in the socioecology of several species of nonhuman primates such as rhesus monkeys. In rhesus, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vPFC) is thought to be part of a circuit involved in representing vocalizations and other auditory objects. To further our understanding of the role of the vPFC in processing vocalizations, we characterized the spectrotemporal features of rhesus vocalizations, compared these features with other classes of natural stimuli, and then related the rhesus-vocalization acoustic features to neural activity. We found that the range of these spectrotemporal features was similar to that found in other ensembles of natural stimuli, including human speech, and identified the subspace of these features that would be particularly informative to discriminate between different vocalizations. In a first neural study, however, we found that the tuning properties of vPFC neurons did not emphasize these particularly informative spectrotemporal features. In a second neural study, we found that a first-order linear model (the spectrotemporal receptive field) is not a good predictor of vPFC activity. The results of these two neural studies are consistent with the hypothesis that the vPFC is not involved in coding the first-order acoustic properties of a stimulus but is involved in processing the higher-order information needed to form representations of auditory objects.

scholarly journals Similar or Different? The Role of the Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Similarity Detection

PLoS ONE ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. e34164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Béatrice Garcin ◽  
Emmanuelle Volle ◽  
Bruno Dubois ◽  
Richard Levy
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Similarity Detection

scholarly journals Conflicting Perspectives on the “Migrant Crisis” in the Horn of Africa

2018 ◽  
pp. 228-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Population Displacement ◽  
Nation States ◽  
And Migration

In sharp contrast to the sense of a “migrant crisis” which prevails in Europe, nation states in the Horn of Africa understand migration, including state-induced population displacement, as unexceptional. The chapter addresses this apparent paradox by contrasting European policy discourse on migration with the long-term political and structural processes in northeastern Africa that cause population displacement and migration. The chapter then examines the migration policies of governments in the Horn and concludes by arguing that the European Union misrepresents and misunderstands the factors responsible for large-scale migration and the role of states in exploiting migrants. For these reasons it is highly unlikely that the EU-Horn of Africa Action Plan/Khartoum process will bring about better border management policies and practices.

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