Behavioral Social Neuroscience Seminar

Damage to orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) can produce a very specific deficit in decision-making. Patients make terrible life decisions and yet in all other respects their cognitive abilities are intact. Over the last decade, a consensus has emerged that an important function of OFC neurons is encoding the value of things in the environment. Without this information, decision-making is severely impaired. In this talk, I will describe a series of experiments that we have performed aimed at taking the next step in understanding how OFC works. Our first experiment examines information flow within OFC. A prominent theory regarding the organization of lateral prefrontal cortex argues that there is a gradient of abstraction, with more abstract information encoded by progressively more abstract cortical regions. We found evidence that the same gradient exists within OFC with progressively more abstract value information being encoded by more anterior OFC regions. In the second part of the talk I will describe two experiments which suggest that any theory of OFC based solely on valuation is incomplete. Value signals in OFC depend heavily on the task in which they occur, and indeed can be a small signal relative to the amount of information OFC encodes about the task. A dominant view is that OFC is responsible for predicting the value of likely outcomes on the basis of the environmental situation. We suggest a related, but alternative view: OFC may be important for making sense of the environmental situation on the basis of predicted outcomes.