Medial Prefrontal Cortex Predicts Intertemporal Choice

Medial Prefrontal Cortex Predicts Intertemporal Choice

People often make shortsighted decisions to receive small benefits in the present rather than large benefits in the future, that is, to favor their current selves over their future selves. In two studies using fMRI, we demonstrated that people make such decisions in part because they fail to engage in the same degree of self-referential processing when thinking about their future selves. When p...

Lateral prefrontal cortex and self-control in intertemporal choice

Dopamine receptor D1/D5 gene expression in the medial prefrontal cortex predicts impulsive choice in rats.

A neuropsychological hallmark of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the reduced ability to tolerate delay of reinforcement, leading to impulsive choice. Genetic association studies have implicated several genes involved in dopaminergic neurotransmission in ADHD. In this study, we investigated whether differences in the expression level of these dopamine-related genes of rats pre...

Medial Prefrontal Cortex Predicts Internally Driven Strategy Shifts

Many daily behaviors require us to actively focus on the current task and ignore all other distractions. Yet, ignoring everything else might hinder the ability to discover new ways to achieve the same goal. Here, we studied the neural mechanisms that support the spontaneous change to better strategies while an established strategy is executed. Multivariate neuroimaging analyses showed that befo...

Learning-Induced Plasticity in Medial Prefrontal Cortex Predicts Preference Malleability

Learning induces plasticity in neuronal networks. As neuronal populations contribute to multiple representations, we reasoned plasticity in one representation might influence others. We used human fMRI repetition suppression to show that plasticity induced by learning another individual's values impacts upon a value representation for oneself in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a plasticity als...