The contribution of ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to response reversal

Abstract

Studies investigating response reversal consistently implicate regions of medial and lateral prefrontal cortex when reinforcement contingencies change. However, it is unclear from these studies how these regions give rise to the individual components of response reversal, such as reinforcement value encoding, response inhibition, and response change. Here we report a novel instrumental learning task designed to determine whether regions implicated in processing reversal errors are uniquely involved in this process, or whether they play a more general role in representing response competition, reinforcement value, or punishment value in the absence of demands for response change. In line with previous findings, reversal errors activated orbitofrontal cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, caudate, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These regions also showed increased activity to errors in the absence of contingency changes. In addition, ventrolateral PFC, caudate, and dorsolateral PFC each exhibited increased activity following correct reversals. Activity in these regions was not significantly modulated by changes in reinforcement value that were not sufficient to make an alternative response advantageous. These data do not support punishment-processing or prepotent reponse inhibition accounts of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex function. Instead, they support recent conceptualizations of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex function that implicate this region in resolving response competition by manipulating the representation of either motor response options, or object features. These data also suggest that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a role in reversal learning, probably through top down attentional control of object or reinforcement features when task demands increase.

Adaptive coding of action values in the human rostral cingulate zone

“…The overall network of brain regions we found to be activated upon reversals included the RCZ, lateral prefrontal cortex, and lateral parietal cortex. This is consistent with previous studies (Cools et al, 2002;Kringelbach and Rolls, 2003;Budhani et al, 2007;Cohen et al, 2007;Mitchell et al, 2008;Jocham et al, 2009).…”

Parsing decision making processes in prefrontal cortex: Response inhibition, overcoming learned avoidance, and reversal learning

“…Lastly, we observed activity in dlPFC that was highest during the early stages of correct classic reversal learning, and least during later trials of this condition. On the basis of these and previous data (Mitchell et al, 2009;Mitchell et al, 2008),we propose a supportive role for dlPFC in enhanced contingency learning, perhaps by way of an attentional mechanism that augments the representation of stimuli and stimulus-reinforcement information. This attentional mechanism would result in enhanced learning and greater ease of decision making (i.e., reduced decision conflict) during later trials -a contribution that may prove more crucial in complex decision making tasks.…”

“…However, functional neuroimaging studies implicate multiple areas of prefrontal cortex in this process including OFC (O'Doherty et al, 2001), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG; Cools et al, 2002;Nagahama et al, 2001), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC; Budhani et al, 2007;Mitchell et al, 2009), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC;Mitchell et al, 2009;Remijnse et al, 2005), and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC; Budhani et al, 2007;O'Doherty et al, 2003a). Studies have also implicated posterior parietal cortex (Glascher et al, 2009;Hampshire and Owen, 2006), and subcortical structures including the amygdala (Budhani et al, 2007;Elliott et al, 2004), and striatum (Hampton and O'Doherty, 2007;Mitchell et al, 2008;Tanaka et al, 2008) in reversal learning. Although a number of neural regions have been implicated, the specific functional contribution of each in this context remains unclear.…”

Hierarchical prediction errors in midbrain and septum during social learning

“…For example, the insula, TPJ and dorsolateral PFC have also been shown to activate during probabilistic reinforcement learning tasks when the reward value of available response options changed (Cools et al , 2002; Remijnse et al , 2005; Mitchell et al , 2008). Furthermore, a network consisting of the bilateral dorsolateral frontal cortex, anterior insula and caudate—a subset of the regions showing ${\varepsilon }_2$ effects—has been repeatedly identified in response to unexpected or cognitively demanding processes in a wide range of studies (O’Reilly et al , 2013; Boorman et al , 2016; Crittenden et al , 2016; Schwartenbeck et al , 2016).…”