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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on June 11, 2008
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn098
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Determining a Role for Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Encoding Action-Based Value Signals During Reward-Related Decision Making

Jan Gläscher, Alan N. Hampton and John P. O'Doherty

Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, MC 114-96, 1200 E. California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125

Address correspondence to Jan Gläscher, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, MC 114-96, Caltech, 1200 E. California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125. Email: glascher{at}hss.caltech.edu.

Considerable evidence has emerged to implicate ventromedial prefrontal cortex in encoding expectations of future reward during value-based decision making. However, the nature of the learned associations upon which such representations depend is much less clear. Here, we aimed to determine whether expected reward representations in this region could be driven by action–outcome associations, rather than being dependent on the associative value assigned to particular discriminative stimuli. Subjects were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing 2 variants of a simple reward-related decision task. In one version, subjects made choices between 2 different physical motor responses in the absence of discriminative stimuli, whereas in the other version, subjects chose between 2 different stimuli that were randomly assigned to different responses on a trial-by-trial basis. Using an extension of a reinforcement learning algorithm, we found activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex tracked expected future reward during the action-based task as well as during the stimulus-based task, indicating that value representations in this region can be driven by action–outcome associations. These findings suggest that ventromedial prefrontal cortex may play a role in encoding the value of chosen actions irrespective of whether those actions denote physical motor responses or more abstract decision options.

Key Words: action value • decision making • reinforcement learning • reversal learning • stimulus value • ventromedial prefrontal cortex


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