Lesions to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex selectively impair reasoning about emotional material
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
While it is widely accepted that lesions to orbital prefrontal cortex lead to emotion related disruptions and poor decision-making, there is very little patient data on this issue involving actual logical reasoning tasks. We tested patients with circumscribed, focal lesions largely confined to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex (BA 10 & 11) (N=17) on logical reasoning tasks involving neutral and emotional content, and compared their performance to that of an age and education-matched normal control group (N=22) and a posterior lesion control group (N=24). Our results revealed a significant group by content interaction driven by a selective impairment in the polar/orbital prefrontal cortex group compared to healthy normal controls and to the parietal patient group, in the emotional content reasoning trials. Subsequent analyses of congruent and incongruent reasoning trials indicated that this impairment was driven by the poor performance of patients with polar/orbital lesions in the incongruent trials. We conclude that the polar/orbital prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in filtering emotionally charged content from the material before it is passed on to the reasoning system in lateral/dorsal regions of prefrontal cortex. Where unfiltered content is passed to the reasoning engine, either as a result of pathology (as in the case of our patients) or as a result of individual differences, reasoning performance suffers.
Date Issued
2017-03-03
Date Acceptance
2017-03-02
Citation
NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA, 2017, 99, pp.236-245
ISSN
0028-3932
Publisher
ELSEVIER
Start Page
236
End Page
245
Journal / Book Title
NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA
Volume
99
Copyright Statement
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This manuscript is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Identifier
http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000401202600025&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Subjects
Science & Technology
Social Sciences
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Behavioral Sciences
Neurosciences
Psychology, Experimental
Neurosciences & Neurology
Psychology
Emotions
Logical reasoning
Decision making
Frontal lobe lesions
Hot and cold reasoning
DECISION-MAKING
MORAL JUDGMENTS
BRAIN
LOGIC
ACTIVATIONS
INFERENCE
NETWORKS
SOFTWARE
DAMAGE
MIND
Experimental Psychology
1109 Neurosciences
1701 Psychology
1702 Cognitive Science
Publication Status
Published