Articles:Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex

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Contents

Somatic Marker Hypothesis

  • system level neuroanatomical and cognitive framework for decision making.
  • emotional processes and feelings could create a bias that effects behavior

assumptions

  1. human reasoning and decision making depend on levels of neural
  2. cognitive operation depend on processes such as attention, working memory and emotion
  3. reasoning and decision making depend on prior knowledge
  4. knowledge could be classified as innate, relation,knowledge about throwing

Impulsiveness

  • Typically seen as function of prefrontal cortex

Motor

  • after conditioning a response, there is a sudden change in the inhibition of the previous rewarded response.
  • this could be measured with go/no go tasks, delayed alteration and response shifting
  • in humans this impulsive behavior is typically found in neuropsychological tasks that detect 'perseverative errors' (Wisconsin Card Sorting)

Cognitive

  • inability to delay gratification
  • The candy and child experiment.

Thoughts

  • Patients with lesions in the VM prefrontal cortex interfere w/ somatic & emotional signals from the brain. These injuries could have sever repercussions on a person decision making process.
  • Substance abuse also have issues in decision making when face with decisions that an immediate reward such a drugs. Hence, the partake in dangerous activities with major repercussion, such as loss of reputation, family and possibly life.
  • Individuals with VM damage also share a resemblance with psycho/sociopathic personalities. The are sometime called "acquired sociopathy", "acquired" meaning injury.
  • Most theories on decision making use a cognitive perspective, and analyzing the "cost benefit" of all possible outcomes and alternatives.
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