Functional specialization of medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex in inferential decision-making

Summary: Inferring prospective outcomes and updating behavior are prerequisites for making flexible decisions in the changing world. These abilities are highly associated with the functions of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in humans and animals. The functional specialization of OFC subregions in de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:iScience
Main Authors: Lixin Qiu, Yidan Qiu, Jiajun Liao, Jinhui Li, Xiaoying Zhang, Kemeng Chen, Qinda Huang, Ruiwang Huang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2024-06-01
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Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422401232X
Description
Summary:Summary: Inferring prospective outcomes and updating behavior are prerequisites for making flexible decisions in the changing world. These abilities are highly associated with the functions of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in humans and animals. The functional specialization of OFC subregions in decision-making has been established in animals. However, the understanding of how human OFC contributes to decision-making remains limited. Therefore, we studied this issue by examining the information representation and functional interactions of human OFC subregions during inference-based decision-making. We found that the medial OFC (mOFC) and lateral OFC (lOFC) collectively represented the inferred outcomes which, however, were context-general coding in the mOFC and context-specific in the lOFC. Furthermore, the mOFC-motor and lOFC-frontoparietal functional connectivity may indicate the motor execution of mOFC and the cognitive control of lOFC during behavioral updating. In conclusion, our findings support the dissociable functional roles of OFC subregions in decision-making.
ISSN:2589-0042