Hosokawa Takayuki, Kato Keichiro, Inoue Masato, Mikami Akichika
Department of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Kanrin, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan.
Neurosci Res. 2007 Mar;57(3):434-45. doi: 10.1016/j.neures.2006.12.003. Epub 2007 Jan 18.
Many studies have shown that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is involved in the processing of emotional information. However, although some lines of study showed that the OFC is also involved in negative emotions, few electrophysiological studies have focused on the characteristics of OFC neuronal responses to aversive information at the individual neuron level. On the other hand, a previous study has shown that many OFC neurons code relative preference of available rewards. In this study, we aimed to elucidate how reward information and aversive information are coded in the OFC at the individual neuron level. To achieve this aim, we introduced the electrical stimulus (ES) as an aversive stimulus, and compared the neuronal responses to the ES-predicting stimulus with those to reward-predicting stimuli. We found that many OFC neurons showed responses to both the ES-predicting stimulus and the reward-predicting stimulus, and they code relative preference of not only the reward outcome but also the aversive outcome. This result suggests that the same group of OFC neurons code both reward and aversive information in the form of relative preference.
许多研究表明，眶额皮质（OFC）参与情绪信息的处理。然而，尽管一些研究表明OFC也参与负面情绪，但很少有电生理研究聚焦于单个神经元水平上OFC神经元对厌恶信息的反应特征。另一方面，先前的一项研究表明，许多OFC神经元编码可用奖励的相对偏好。在本研究中，我们旨在阐明奖励信息和厌恶信息在单个神经元水平上是如何在OFC中编码的。为实现这一目标，我们引入电刺激（ES）作为厌恶刺激，并将对ES预测刺激的神经元反应与对奖励预测刺激的反应进行比较。我们发现，许多OFC神经元对ES预测刺激和奖励预测刺激均有反应，并且它们不仅编码奖励结果的相对偏好，还编码厌恶结果的相对偏好。这一结果表明，同一组OFC神经元以相对偏好的形式编码奖励和厌恶信息。
