Journal article

The role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in abstract state-based inference during decision making in humans

Alan N Hampton, Peter Bossaerts, John P O'Doherty

JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE | SOC NEUROSCIENCE | Published : 2006

Abstract

Many real-life decision-making problems incorporate higher-order structure, involving interdependencies between different stimuli, actions, and subsequent rewards. It is not known whether brain regions implicated in decision making, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), use a stored model of the task structure to guide choice (model-based decision making) or merely learn action or state values without assuming higher-order structure as in standard reinforcement learning. To discriminate between these possibilities, we scanned human subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they performed a simple decision-making task with higher-order structure, probabilistic re..

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University of Melbourne Researchers