The Role of Orbitofrontal Cortex in Decision Making
Clinical accounts of the effects of damage to orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) have provided important clues about the functions of this region in humans. Patients with OFC injury can demonstrate relatively isolated difficulties with decision making, and the development of laboratory tasks that captured these difficulties was an important advance. However, much of the work to date has been limited by the use of a single, complex decision-making task and by a narrow focus on risky decisions. A fuller understanding of the neural basis of decision making requires identification of the simpler components that underlie this complex behavior. Here, I review evidence that OFC lesions disrupt reversal learning in humans, as in animals, and show that this deficit in reversal learning is an important mechanism underlying the difficulties of such patients in the Iowa gambling task. Reversal learning, in turn, can be decomposed into simpler processe
human lesion reversal learning neuroeconomics executive function prefrontal cortex