Walton Mark E, Rudebeck Peter H, Bannerman David M, Rushworth Matthew F S
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2007 May;1104:340-56. doi: 10.1196/annals.1390.009. Epub 2007 Mar 14.
To make informed and successful decisions, it is vital to be able to evaluate whether the expected benefits of a course of action make it worth tolerating the costs incurred to obtain them. The frontal lobe has been implicated in several aspects of goal-directed action selection, social interaction, and optimal choice behavior. However, its exact contribution has remained elusive. Here, we discuss a series of studies in rats and primates examining the effect of discrete lesions on different aspects of cost-benefit decision making. Rats with excitotoxic lesions of the anterior cingulate cortex became less willing to invest effort for reward but showed no change when having to tolerate delays. Orbitofrontal cortex-lesioned rats, by contrast, became more impulsive, yet were just as prepared as normal animals to expend energy to obtain reward. The sulcal region of primate anterior cingulate cortex was also shown to be essential for dynamically integrating over time the recent history of choices and outcomes. Selecting a particular course of action may also come at the expense of gathering important information about other individuals. Evaluating social information when deciding whether to respond was demonstrated to be a function of the anterior cingulate gyrus. Taken together, this indicates that there may be dissociable pathways in the frontal lobe for managing different types of response cost and for gathering social information.
为了做出明智且成功的决策，能够评估某一行动方案的预期收益是否使其值得承受为获取这些收益而产生的成本至关重要。额叶在目标导向行动选择、社会互动和最优选择行为的多个方面都有涉及。然而，其确切作用仍不明确。在此，我们讨论一系列在大鼠和灵长类动物身上进行的研究，这些研究考察了离散性损伤对成本效益决策不同方面的影响。前扣带回皮质有兴奋性毒性损伤的大鼠为获取奖励而投入努力的意愿降低，但在不得不忍受延迟时没有变化。相比之下，眶额皮质损伤的大鼠变得更加冲动，但与正常动物一样愿意消耗能量来获取奖励。灵长类动物前扣带回皮质的沟回区域对于随着时间动态整合近期选择和结果的历史记录也至关重要。选择某一特定行动方案可能也会以牺牲收集关于其他个体的重要信息为代价。在决定是否做出反应时评估社会信息被证明是前扣带回的一项功能。综合来看，这表明额叶中可能存在可分离的通路来管理不同类型的反应成本以及收集社会信息。
