Ma Fengjun, Lin Huixin, Zhou Jingfeng
Beijing Institute for Brain Research, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing 102206, China; College of Biological Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China; Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing 102206, China.
Beijing Institute for Brain Research, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing 102206, China; Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing 102206, China; Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Curr Biol. 2025 Apr 7;35(7):R266-R272. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.02.021.
Our understanding of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has significantly evolved over the past few decades. This prefrontal region has been associated with a wide range of cognitive functions, including a popular view that it primarily signals the expected value of each possible option, allowing downstream areas to use these value signals for decision-making. However, the discovery of rich, task-related information within the OFC and its essential role in inference-based behaviors has shifted our perspective and led to the proposal that the OFC holds a cognitive map used by both humans and animals for making predictions and inferences. Recent studies have further shown that these cognitive maps can be abstracted and generalized, serving both immediate and future needs. In this review, we trace the research journey leading to these evolving insights, discuss the potential neural mechanisms supporting the OFC's roles in prediction, inference, and generalization, and compare the OFC with the hippocampus, another critical region for cognitive mapping, while also exploring the interactions between these two areas.
在过去几十年里，我们对眶额皮质（OFC）的理解有了显著进展。这个前额叶区域与广泛的认知功能相关，其中一种普遍观点认为它主要表征每个可能选项的预期价值，使下游区域能够利用这些价值信号进行决策。然而，在眶额皮质内发现丰富的、与任务相关的信息及其在基于推理的行为中的关键作用，改变了我们的观点，并促使人们提出，眶额皮质拥有一种认知地图，供人类和动物用于进行预测和推理。最近的研究进一步表明，这些认知地图可以被抽象和概括，以满足当前和未来的需求。在这篇综述中，我们追溯了导致这些不断演变的见解的研究历程，讨论了支持眶额皮质在预测、推理和概括中作用的潜在神经机制，并将眶额皮质与海马体（认知地图的另一个关键区域）进行比较，同时还探讨了这两个区域之间的相互作用。
