van Geen Camilla, Chen Yixin, Kazinka Rebecca, Vaidya Avinash R, Kable Joseph W, McGuire Joseph T
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.
J Neurosci. 2025 Feb 5;45(6):e0068242024. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0068-24.2024.
Deciding how long to keep waiting for uncertain future rewards is a complex problem. Previous research has shown that choosing to stop waiting results from an evaluative process that weighs the subjective value of the awaited reward against the opportunity cost of waiting. Activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) tracks the dynamics of this evaluation, while activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and anterior insula (AI) ramps up before a decision to quit is made. Here, we provide causal evidence of the necessity of these brain regions for successful performance in a willingness-to-wait task. Twenty-eight participants (20 female and 8 male) with lesions to different regions of the frontal lobe were tested on their ability to adaptively calibrate how long they waited for monetary rewards. We found that participants with lesions to the vmPFC waited less overall, while participants with lesions to the dmPFC and anterior insula were specifically impaired at calibrating their level of persistence to the environment. These behavioral effects were accounted for by systematic differences in parameter estimates from a computational model of task performance.
决定为不确定的未来回报等待多长时间是一个复杂的问题。先前的研究表明，选择停止等待是一个评估过程的结果，该过程会权衡等待奖励的主观价值与等待的机会成本。腹内侧前额叶皮层（vmPFC）的活动跟踪了这一评估的动态过程，而背内侧前额叶皮层（dmPFC）和前脑岛（AI）的激活则在做出放弃决定之前增强。在这里，我们提供了因果证据，证明这些脑区对于在等待意愿任务中成功表现的必要性。对28名额叶不同区域受损的参与者（20名女性和8名男性）进行了测试，以考察他们自适应校准等待金钱奖励时长的能力。我们发现，vmPFC受损的参与者总体等待时间较短，而dmPFC和前脑岛受损的参与者在根据环境校准其坚持程度方面存在特定障碍。这些行为效应可由任务表现计算模型中参数估计的系统差异来解释。
