Human Neuroscience Institute.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Jul;147(7):1094-1109. doi: 10.1037/xge0000434.
Criminal behavior has been associated with abnormal neural activity when people experience risks and rewards or exercise inhibition. However, neural substrates of mental representations that underlie criminal and noncriminal risk-taking in adulthood have received scant attention. We take a new approach, applying fuzzy-trace theory, to examine neural substrates of risk preferences and criminality. We extend ideas about gist (simple meaning) and verbatim (precise risk-reward tradeoffs) representations used to explain adolescent risk-taking to uncover neural correlates of developmentally inappropriate adult risk-taking. We tested predictions using a risky-choice framing task completed in the MRI scanner, and examined neural covariation with self-reported criminal and noncriminal risk-taking. As predicted, risk-taking was correlated with a behavioral pattern of risk preferences called "reverse framing" (preferring sure losses over a risky option and a risky option over sure gains, the opposite of typical framing biases) that has been linked to risky behavior in adolescents and is rarely observed in nondisordered adults. Experimental manipulations confirmed processing interpretations of typical framing (gist-based) and reverse-framing (verbatim-based) risk preferences. In the brain, covariation with criminal and noncriminal risk-taking was observed predominantly when subjects made reverse-framing choices. Noncriminal risk-taking behavior was associated with emotional reactivity (amygdala) and reward motivation (striatal) areas, whereas criminal behavior was associated with greater activation in temporal and parietal cortices, their junction, and insula. When subjects made more developmentally typical framing choices, reflecting nonpreferred gist processing, activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex covaried with criminal risk-taking, which may reflect cognitive effort to process gist while inhibiting preferred verbatim processing. (PsycINFO Database Record
犯罪行为与人们在体验风险和奖励或行使抑制时的异常神经活动有关。然而，成人犯罪和非犯罪风险行为所依赖的心理表象的神经基质却很少受到关注。我们采用一种新方法，应用模糊痕迹理论，来研究风险偏好和犯罪的神经基质。我们扩展了用于解释青少年风险行为的要点（简单意义）和逐字（精确的风险-回报权衡）表示的想法，以揭示发展不适当的成人风险行为的神经相关性。我们使用 MRI 扫描仪中完成的风险选择框架任务来检验预测，并检查与自我报告的犯罪和非犯罪风险行为的神经共变。正如所预测的那样，风险偏好与一种被称为“反向框架”的风险偏好行为模式相关，这种模式在青少年中与风险行为有关，在非紊乱成人中很少观察到。实验操作证实了典型框架（基于要点）和反向框架（基于逐字）风险偏好的处理解释。在大脑中，当受试者做出反向框架选择时，观察到与犯罪和非犯罪风险行为的共变。非犯罪风险行为与情绪反应（杏仁核）和奖励动机（纹状体）区域有关，而犯罪行为与颞叶和顶叶皮质及其交界处以及岛叶的更大激活有关。当受试者做出更具发展性的典型框架选择时，反映出非偏好要点处理，与犯罪风险相关的背外侧前额叶皮层的激活共变，这可能反映了处理要点的认知努力，同时抑制偏好的逐字处理。
