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Friday, April 16, 2021

Reduced decision bias and more rational decision making following ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage

S. Manohar, et al.
Cortex, Volume 138, 
May 2021, Pages 24-37

Abstract

Human decisions are susceptible to biases, but establishing causal roles of brain areas has proved to be difficult. Here we studied decision biases in 17 people with unilateral medial prefrontal cortex damage and a rare patient with bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) lesions. Participants learned to choose which of two options was most likely to win, and then bet money on the outcome. Thus, good performance required not only selecting the best option, but also the amount to bet. Healthy people were biased by their previous bet, as well as by the unchosen option's value. Unilateral medial prefrontal lesions reduced these biases, leading to more rational decisions. Bilateral vmPFC lesions resulted in more strategic betting, again with less bias from the previous trial, paradoxically improving performance overall. Together, the results suggest that vmPFC normally imposes contextual biases, which in healthy people may actually be suboptimal in some situations.

From the Discussion

The findings presented here show that it is indeed possible for more rational decision making to emerge at least on a value based reversal learning task after bilateral vmPFC lesions. This is not to say that all decisions and behaviours become more rational after such brain damage. Clearly, although he managed to continue to work in a demanding job, patient MJ showed evidence of dysfunction in social cognition
and some aspects of decision making and judgment in everyday life, just as previous reported cases (Bechara et al., 2000; Berlin et al., 2004; Eslinger & Damasio, 1985; ShamayTsoory et al., 2005).

There is some previous circumstantial evidence that mPFC lesions may reduce decision biases. For example, patients with mPFC damage show smaller biases in probabilistic estimation (O’Callaghan et al., 2018), reduced affective contributions to reasoning (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2005), and may indeed make more utilitarian moral judgements, suggesting more rational valuation with less affective bias (Ciaramelli
et al., 2007; Koenigs et al., 2007; Krajbich et al., 2009). These effects might be underpinned by a more general increase in rationality after damage to this region. One possible explanation for this is that individuals with vmPFC lesions might be free of affective biases that normally contribute to such decision making but this remains to be established.