Buckholtz Joshua W, Asplund Christopher L, Dux Paul E, Zald David H, Gore John C, Jones Owen D, Marois René
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA.
Neuron. 2008 Dec 10;60(5):930-40. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.10.016.
Legal decision-making in criminal contexts includes two essential functions performed by impartial "third parties:" assessing responsibility and determining an appropriate punishment. To explore the neural underpinnings of these processes, we scanned subjects with fMRI while they determined the appropriate punishment for crimes that varied in perpetrator responsibility and crime severity. Activity within regions linked to affective processing (amygdala, medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex) predicted punishment magnitude for a range of criminal scenarios. By contrast, activity in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex distinguished between scenarios on the basis of criminal responsibility, suggesting that it plays a key role in third-party punishment. The same prefrontal region has previously been shown to be involved in punishing unfair economic behavior in two-party interactions, raising the possibility that the cognitive processes supporting third-party legal decision-making and second-party economic norm enforcement may be supported by a common neural mechanism in human prefrontal cortex.
刑事背景下的法律决策包括公正的“第三方”执行的两项基本职能：评估责任和确定适当的惩罚。为了探究这些过程的神经基础，我们在受试者为不同犯罪责任和犯罪严重程度的罪行确定适当惩罚时，用功能磁共振成像扫描了他们。与情感处理相关的脑区（杏仁核、内侧前额叶和后扣带回皮质）内的活动预测了一系列犯罪场景的惩罚力度。相比之下，右侧背外侧前额叶皮质的活动根据刑事责任区分不同场景，这表明它在第三方惩罚中起关键作用。此前已表明，同一前额叶区域参与了双方互动中对不公平经济行为的惩罚，这增加了一种可能性，即支持第三方法律决策和第二方经济规范执行的认知过程可能由人类前额叶皮质中的一种共同神经机制提供支持。
