Dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex orchestrate normative choice.

Baumgartner, Thomas; Knoch, Daria; Hotz, Philine; Eisenegger, Christoph; Fehr, Ernst (2011). Dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex orchestrate normative choice. Nature neuroscience, 14(11), pp. 1468-1474. Nature America 10.1038/nn.2933

[img] Text
Baumgartner_NatureNeuroscience2011.pdf - Published Version
Restricted to registered users only
Available under License Publisher holds Copyright.

Download (684kB)

Humans are noted for their capacity to over-ride self-interest in favor of normatively valued goals. We examined the neural circuitry that is causally involved in normative, fairness-related decisions by generating a temporarily diminished capacity for costly normative behavior, a 'deviant' case, through non-invasive brain stimulation (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) and compared normal subjects' functional magnetic resonance imaging signals with those of the deviant subjects. When fairness and economic self-interest were in conflict, normal subjects (who make costly normative decisions at a much higher frequency) displayed significantly higher activity in, and connectivity between, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex (pVMPFC). In contrast, when there was no conflict between fairness and economic self-interest, both types of subjects displayed identical neural patterns and behaved identically. These findings suggest that a parsimonious prefrontal network, the activation of right DLPFC and pVMPFC, and the connectivity between them, facilitates subjects' willingness to incur the cost of normative decisions.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology > Social Neuroscience and Social Psychology

UniBE Contributor:

Baumgartner, Thomas, Knoch, Daria

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
100 Philosophy > 150 Psychology

ISSN:

1097-6256

Publisher:

Nature America

Language:

English

Submitter:

Thomas Baumgartner

Date Deposited:

17 Oct 2014 10:43

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:36

Publisher DOI:

10.1038/nn.2933

PubMed ID:

21964488

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.58300

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/58300

Actions (login required)

Edit item Edit item
Provide Feedback