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Reassessing VMPFC: full of confidence?

Nature Neuroscience volume 18, pages 1064–1066 (2015)Cite this article

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The confidence that we place in our decisions can affect the judgments themselves. The BOLD signal in ventromedial prefrontal cortex automatically reflects the relationship between confidence and judgments on a range of tasks.

From restaurants to prospective partners, the propensity to rate is a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. When such ratings tasks are associated with value, such that one end of the scale is more attractive than the other, they have led to one of the most influential neural signals in cognitive neuroscience. Several brain regions, but most robustly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), have been found to provide a readout of this value as participants perform ratings1, make choices2,3,4,5 or even simply witness items6. This signal has been taken to reflect an internal variable that is essential for guiding behavior and has received great attention, as it aligns with a participant's 'willingness to pay', one of the key variables in economic descriptions of behavior7,8.

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Figure 1: Rating judgments show a quadratic relationship with confidence and VMPFC BOLD signal.

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Affiliations

  1. Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK

    Helen C Barron, Mona M Garvert & Timothy E J Behrens

  2. Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, University of Oxford, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK

    Timothy E J Behrens

Authors
  1. Helen C Barron
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  2. Mona M Garvert
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  3. Timothy E J Behrens
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Correspondence to Mona M Garvert.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Barron, H., Garvert, M. & Behrens, T. Reassessing VMPFC: full of confidence?. Nat Neurosci 18, 1064–1066 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4076

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