The predicted reward of different behavioral options plays an important role in guiding decisions. Previous research has identified reward predictions in prefrontal and striatal brain regions. Moreover, it has been shown that the neural representation of a predicted reward is similar to the neural representation of the actual reward outcome. However, it has remained unknown how these representa...

Decisions require careful weighing of the risks and benefits associated with a choice. Some people need to be offered large rewards to balance even minimal risks, whereas others take great risks in the hope for an only minimal benefit. We show here that risk-taking is a modifiable behavior that depends on right hemisphere prefrontal activity. We used low-frequency, repetitive transcranial magne...

Social anxiety--the fear of social embarrassment and negative evaluation by others--ranks among people's worst fears, and it is often thought to impair task performance. We investigated the neurocognitive processes through which trait social anxiety relates to task performance, proposing a model of the joint contributions of reactive control, theoretically associated with conflict monitoring an...

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has been used in experimental protocols to treat mal de debarquement syndrome (MdDS), a neurological condition that represents a maladaptive brain state resulting from entrainment to external oscillating motion. Medical treatments and biomarkers for MdDS remain limited but neuromodulation with rTMS has shown evidence for therapeutic effects. T...

Extinction is an important mechanism to inhibit initially acquired fear responses. There is growing evidence that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) inhibits the amygdala and therefore plays an important role in the extinction of delay fear conditioning. To our knowledge, there is no evidence on the role of the prefrontal cortex in the extinction of trace conditioning up to now. Thus, w...

Cognitive control deficits have been consistently documented in patients with schizophrenia. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience has hypothesized a distinction between two theoretically separable modes of cognitive control-reactive and proactive. However, it remains unclear the extent to which these processes are uniquely associated with dysfunctional neural recruitment in individuals with sc...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to modulate subjective craving ratings in drug dependents by modification of cortical excitability in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Given the mechanism of craving in methamphetamine (meth) users, we aimed to test whether tDCS of DLPFC could also alter self-reported craving in abstinent meth users while being exposed to meth...

Negative symptoms are highly relevant in the long-term course of schizophrenia and are an important target domain for the development of novel interventions. Recently, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the prefrontal cortex has been investigated as a treatment option in schizophrenia. In this proof-of-concept study, 20 schizophrenia patients with predominantly negative symptoms ...

Abstract Previous work investigating the effect of rTMS left Dorso-Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) on Stroop task performance reports no changes to but reduced reaction times both congruent and incongruent trials relative sham stimulation; an attributed enhanced attentional (or task) set for colour classification. The present study tested this account by whether, vertex stimulation, DLPFC mod...

Previous studies have suggested that patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls exhibit differential activation of and connectivity involving the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during working memory tasks, though their findings remain inconsistent. The functional integration perspective further suggests that working memory performance also modulates differences in functional inter...