Abstract
Decision-making studies have implicated the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in tracking the value of rewards and punishments. At the same time, fear-learning studies have pointed to a role of the same area in updating previously learned cue–outcome associations. To disentangle these accounts, we used a reward reversal-learning paradigm in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in 18 human participants. Participants first learned that one of two colored squares (color A) was associated with monetary reward, whereas the other (color B) was not, and then had to learn that these contingencies reversed. Consistent with value representation, activity of a dorsal region of vmPFC was positively correlated with reward magnitude. Conversely, a more ventral region of vmPFC responded more to color A than to color B after contingency reversal, compatible with a role of inhibiting the previously learned response that was no longer appropriate. Moreover, the response strength was correlated with subjects’ behavioral learning strength. Our findings provide direct evidence for the spatial dissociation of value representation and affective response inhibition in the vmPFC.
Footnotes
↵1 The authors report no conflict of interest.
↵3 This work was funded by NIH/NIMH Grant R21MH102634 and CTSA Grant (UL1 TR000142) from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) to I.L., and by NIH/NIMH Grant R01MH105515 and a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences to D.S.; the contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of NIH. We thank John O’Doherty for the original idea for this study and Ruonan Jia and Eric Feltham for helpful comments on the manuscript.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.