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Brain Advance Access originally published online on March 15, 2008
Brain 2008 131(5):1323-1331; doi:10.1093/brain/awn041
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The human ventromedial frontal lobe is critical for learning from negative feedback

Elizabeth Z. Wheeler1,2 and Lesley K. Fellows2,3

1Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, CA, 2Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA and 3Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Correspondence to: Lesley K. Fellows, MD CM, DPhil, Montreal Neurological Institute, Rm 276, 3801 rue Université, Montréal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada E-mail: lesley.fellows{at}mcgill.ca

Are positive and negative feedback weighed in a common balance in the brain, or do they influence behaviour through distinct neural mechanisms? Recent neuroeconomic studies in both human and non-human primates indicate that the ventromedial frontal lobe carries information about both losses and gains, suggesting that this region may encode value across the continuum from absolute negative to absolute positive outcomes. However, such work does not specify whether or how this value information is applied during behaviour. Observations of patients with ventromedial frontal damage indicate that this region is critical for certain forms of reinforcement learning and value-based decision-making, but the underlying processes remain unclear. We disentangled the influence of cumulative positive and negative feedback on subsequent behaviour with a probabilistic reinforcement learning task in 11 patients with ventromedial frontal damage, 9 lesioned controls and 24 healthy controls, and found that ventromedial frontal damage selectively disrupted the ability to learn from negative feedback.

Key Words: decision making; orbitofrontal cortex; reversal learning; neuroeconomics; lesion

Abbreviations: OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; PFC, prefrontal cortex

Received September 19, 2007. Revised February 11, 2008. Accepted February 20, 2008.


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