The role of human orbitofrontal cortex in reward prediction and behavioral choice: Insights from neuroimaging

© Oxford University Press 2006. All rights reserved. In order to survive, most animals including humans need to be able to learn and adapt flexibly their behavior so that optimal choices can be made in an uncertain environment. This chapter reviews functional neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies on the nature of the orbitofrontal cortices (OFC) contribution to adaptive and flexible behavior in humans. These studies indicate that the OFC encodes the reward and punishment value of stimuli, maintains flexible representations of predicted reward and punishment value (using both stimulus substitution and CS-specific coding mechanisms), encodes errors in reward prediction, and signals future behavioral choice. The OFC shows heterogeneous response profiles with distinct regions mediating each of these functions. The relationship of the OFC to other brains regions processing reward is also discussed.