Contrasting Effects of Medial and Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex Lesions on Credit Assignment and Decision-Making in Humans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The orbitofrontal cortex is critical for goal-directed behavior. Recent work in macaques has suggested the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) is relatively more concerned with assignment of credit for rewards to particular choices during value-guided learning, whereas the medial orbitofrontal cortex (often referred to as ventromedial prefrontal cortex in humans; vmPFC/mOFC) is involved in constraining the decision to the relevant options. We examined whether people with damage restricted to subregions of prefrontal cortex showed the patterns of impairment observed in prior investigations of the effects of lesions to homologous regions in macaques. Groups of patients with either lOFC (predominantly right hemisphere), mOFC/vmPFC, or dorsomedial prefrontal (DMF), and a comparison group of healthy age- and education-matched controls performed a probabilistic 3-choice decision-making task. We report anatomically specific patterns of impairment. We found that credit assignment, as indexed by the normal influence of contingent relationships between choice and reward, is reduced in lOFC patients compared with Controls and mOFC/vmPFC patients. Moreover, the effects of reward contingency on choice were similar for patients with lesions in DMF or mOFC/vmPFC, compared with Controls. By contrast, mOFC/vmPFC-lesioned patients made more stochastic choices than Controls when the decision was framed by valuable distracting alternatives, suggesting that value comparisons were no longer independent of irrelevant options. Once again, there was evidence of regional specialization: patients with lOFC lesions were unimpaired relative to Controls. As in macaques, human lOFC and mOFC/vmPFC are necessary for contingent learning and value-guided decision-making, respectively. <b>SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT</b> The lateral and medial regions of the orbitofrontal cortex are cytoarchitectonically distinct and have different anatomical connections. Previous investigations in macaques have shown these anatomical differences are accompanied by functional specialization for learning and decision-making. Here, for the first time, we test the predictions made by macaque studies in an experiment with humans with frontal lobe lesions, asking whether behavioral impairments can be linked to lateral or medial orbitofrontal cortex. Using equivalent tasks and computational analyses, our findings broadly replicate the pattern reported after selective lesions in monkeys. Patients with lateral orbitofrontal damage had impaired credit assignment, whereas damage to medial orbitofrontal cortex meant that patients were more likely to be distracted by irrelevant options.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".