Decision Making in the Orbitofrontal Cortex

         There are many neural circuits that dictate thought processing in the brain. The Orbitofrontal neural circuit is an important part of the brain that is shown to be active when processing mission making. People make decisions everyday, such as choosing what food to eat or what clothes they should wear in the morning. Thornston Kant has shown in his research that the Orbitofrontal cortex is a major component for decision making in non-human primates and human subjects. In another article by Ramon Nogueira, he demonstrates that the OFC encodes upcoming choices in rat subjects.

    Thorston Kant found results that directly correlate the OFC and decision making processes. The experiment created by Kant had non-human primates initially learn two choices. Once they made their preferred choice, the experimenters induced Sham brain stimulation in the OFC. Once they did this, they discovered that subjects in the Sham stimulation group would prefer the opposite choice instead of the choice they made initially. These results exhibit the neural circuits responsible for decision making in the OFC.

    Another study I found had a similar study that used rat subjects to test neural processes of their OFC. Ramon Nogueira had tetrodes inserted to the right hemisphere of the rat targeting the OFC section of the brain. In this study the rats were placed in a box that had three adjacent compartments. The rats were placed in one compartment while the other two were closed off but had socket openings for each. The rats were induced with two physical stimulus and one of the sockets from one room opened up while the stimulus was induced. After multiple trials, one socket was deemed the reward socket and had water as the reward. The tetrodes were used to measure the activation of the neuronal units in the OFC and illustrated a correlation between perceptual decision-making and OFC activation.

Overall, theses researchers have presented results that directly associate the OFC with decision making process in the brain. This evidence can help doctors understand why damage to the OFC may affect a patients decisions making. Perhaps this study may lead to a method for repairing this section of the brain through stimulation.

References:

Fang Wang, Thorsten Kahnt, Neural circuits for inference-based decision-making, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 41,2021, Pages 10-14, ISSN 2352-1546, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.02.004.

Nogueira, R. et al. Lateral orbitofrontal cortex anticipates choices and integrates prior with current                 information. Nat. Commun. 8, 14823 doi: 10.1038/ncomms14823 (2017).