A boost of confidence: The role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in memory, decision-making, and schemas

Hebscher, Melissa; Gilboa, Asaf

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.05.003

Cited by 106 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 96 publications

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“…The process of restructuring existing associations could occur at encoding, during consolidation, or at retrieval (Gilboa & Marlatte, ; Hebscher & Gilboa, ; Schlichting, Mumford, & Preston, ; Zeithamova, Schlichting, & Preston, ) For example, during acquisition animals might encode AB+, BA+, A+, and B+. Alternatively, it could be that during offline replay and consolidation different constituents are independently stored to allow later retrieval either in combination or on their own.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The hippocampus is critical for value‐based decisions guided by dissociative inference

et al. 2018

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The hippocampus supports flexible decision‐making through memory integration: bridging across episodes and inferring associations between stimuli that were never presented together (‘associative inference’). A pre‐requisite for memory integration is flexible representations of the relationships between stimuli within episodes (AB) but also of the constituent units (A,B). Here we investigated whether the hippocampus is required for parsing experienced episodes into their constituents to infer their re‐combined within‐episode associations (‘dissociative inference’). In three experiments male rats were trained on an appetitive conditioning task using compound auditory stimuli (AB+, BA+, CD−, DC−). At test either the compound or individual stimuli were presented as well as new stimuli. Rats with hippocampal lesions acquired and retained the compound discriminations as well as controls. Single constituent stimuli (A, B, C, D) were presented for the first time at test, so the only value with which they could be associated was the one from the compound to which they belonged. Controls inferred constituent tones’ corresponding values while hippocampal rats did not, treating them as merely familiar stimuli with no associated value. This finding held whether compound training occurred before or after hippocampal lesions, suggesting that hippocampus‐dependent inferential processes more likely occur at retrieval. The findings extend recent discoveries about the role of the hippocampus in intrinsic value representation, demonstrating hippocampal contributions to allocating value from primary rewards to individual stimuli. Importantly, we discovered that dissociative inferences serve to restructure or reparse patterns of directly acquired associations when animals are faced with environmental changes and need to extract relevant information from a multiplex memory. The hippocampus is critical for this fundamental flexible use of associations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The hippocampus is critical for value‐based decisions guided by dissociative inference

et al. 2018

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“…Notably, one study showed that fMRI activation in the VMPFC was modulated by confidence across four different tasks involving both value-based and non-value based rating judgments (Lebreton et al, 2015). Furthermore, evidence from memory-related decision making research appears to also implicate the VMPFC in confidence processing (see Hebscher and Gilboa (2016) for a review). Our work, therefore, complements the existing literature by bringing empirical support for the involvement of VMPFC in perceptual decision making.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human VMPFC encodes early signatures of confidence in perceptual decisions

Gherman

Philiastides

2017

Preprint

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Choice confidence, an individual's internal estimate of judgment accuracy, plays a critical role in adaptive behaviour. Despite its importance, the early (decisional) stages of confidence processing remain underexplored. Here, we recorded simultaneous EEG/fMRI while participants performed a direction discrimination task and rated their confidence on each trial. Using multivariate single-trial discriminant analysis of the EEG, we identified a stimulus-and accuracy-independent component encoding confidence, appearing prior to subjects' choice and explicit confidence report. The trial-totrial variability in this EEG-derived confidence signal was uniquely associated with fMRI responses in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), a region not typically associated with confidence for perceptual decisions. Furthermore, we showed that the VMPFC was functionally coupled with regions of the prefrontal cortex that support neural representations of confidence during explicit metacognitive report. Our results suggest that the VMPFC encodes an early confidence readout, preceding and potentially informing metacognitive evaluation and learning, by acting as an implicit value/reward signal.

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“…Thus, age-related differences may involve one or more of the three following three processes: (1) schema processing, (2) generation, and (3) post-retrieval monitoring. First, schema processing (e.g., how a harbor looks like) has been strongly associated with PFC regions, especially ventromedial PFC (van Kesteren et al 2010;Preston and Eichenbaum 2013;Ghosh et al 2014;Hebscher and Gilboa 2016;Gilboa and Moscovitch 2017), and there is evidence that OAs differentially rely on schematic knowledge compared to YAs (Mather et al 1999;Spreng and Turner 2019). Second, generation is essential for recall tests, which are more dependent on PFC (Cabeza et al 1997) than generation-independent item recognition tests.…”

Section: Pfc Compensates For Mtl Deficit By Reconfigurationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-related compensatory reconfiguration of PFC connections during episodic memory retrieval

Deng

Stanley

Monge

et al. 2019

Preprint

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During demanding cognitive tasks, older adults (OAs) frequently show greater prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity than younger adults (YAs). This age-related PFC activity increase is often associated with enhanced cognitive performance, suggesting functional compensation. However, the brain is a complex network of interconnected regions, and it is unclear how network connectivity of PFC regions differs for OAs vs. YAs. To investigate this, we examined the age-related difference in functional brain network mediating episodic memory retrieval. YAs and OAs participants encoded and then recalled visual scenes, and age-related differences in network topology during memory retrieval were investigated as a function of memory performance. We measured both quantitative changes in functional integration and qualitative reconfiguration in connectivity patterns. The study yielded three main findings. First, PFC regions were more functionally integrated with the rest of the brain network in OAs. Critically, this age-related increase in PFC integration was associated with better retrieval performance. Second, PFC regions showed stronger performance-related reconfiguration of connectivity patterns in OAs. Finally, the magnitude of PFC reconfiguration increases in OAs tracked reconfiguration reductions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL)a core episodic memory region, suggesting that PFC connectivity in OAs may be compensating for MTL deficits.

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A boost of confidence: The role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in memory, decision-making, and schemas

Cited by 106 publications

References 96 publications

The hippocampus is critical for value‐based decisions guided by dissociative inference

The hippocampus is critical for value‐based decisions guided by dissociative inference

Human VMPFC encodes early signatures of confidence in perceptual decisions

Age-related compensatory reconfiguration of PFC connections during episodic memory retrieval

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