Brain Advance Access originally published online on February 2, 2006
Brain 2006 129(4):944-952; doi:10.1093/brain/awl017
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Deciding how to decide: ventromedial frontal lobe damage affects information acquisition in multi-attribute decision making
Montreal Neurological Institute, rue Université, Montréal, QC, Canada
Correspondence to: Lesley K. Fellows, Montreal Neurological Institute, Room 276, 3801 rue Université, Montréal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada E-mail: lesley.fellows{at}mcgill.ca
Ventromedial frontal lobe (VMF) damage is associated with impaired decision making. Recent efforts to understand the functions of this brain region have focused on its role in tracking reward, punishment and risk. However, decision making is complex, and frontal lobe damage might be expected to affect it at other levels. This study used process-tracing techniques to explore the effect of VMF damage on multi-attribute decision making under certainty. Thirteen subjects with focal VMF damage were compared with 11 subjects with frontal damage that spared the VMF and 21 demographically matched healthy control subjects. Participants chose rental apartments in a standard information board task drawn from the literature on normal decision making. VMF subjects performed the decision making task in a way that differed markedly from all other groups, favouring an ‘alternative-based’ information acquisition strategy (i.e. they organized their information search around individual apartments). In contrast, both healthy control subjects and subjects with damage predominantly involving dorsal and/or lateral prefrontal cortex pursued primarily ‘attribute-based’ search strategies (in which information was acquired about categories such as rent and noise level across several apartments). This difference in the pattern of information acquisition argues for systematic differences in the underlying decision heuristics and strategies employed by subjects with VMF damage, which in turn may affect the quality of their choices. These findings suggest that the processes supported by ventral and medial prefrontal cortex need to be conceptualized more broadly, to account for changes in decision making under conditions of certainty, as well as uncertainty, following damage to these areas.
Key Words: executive function; problem solving; prefrontal cortex; human, lesion
Abbreviations: D-CTL = dorsal/lateral control group; D/LF = dorsal and/or lateral frontal lobe; V-CTL = ventromedial control group; VMF = ventromedial frontal lobe
Received September 28, 2005. Revised December 23, 2005. Accepted January 2, 2006.
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