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Christa L Watson Pereira, The Often Overlooked and Underappreciated Orbitofrontal Cortex, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, Volume 35, Issue 7, October 2020, Pages 1183–1185, https://doi.org/10.1093/arclin/acaa045
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Extract
Edmund Rolls presents a compelling compendium on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and explores its role in emotion, motivation, and psychiatric syndromes. Although the book may, at first blush, appeal more to basic science experimental psychologists, there are several pearls of insight and inspiration for translational and clinical neuropsychologists, clinicians designing mental health interventions, as well as anyone interested in learning more about neuroanatomy, brain functions and systems, and reward and decision-making neuroscience.
Rolls writes in a linear, detailed, and logical manner that educates the reader well and ensures no stone goes unturned. This is most evident in the longest chapter of the book, Chapter 3, in which he covers an overall framework for how the OFC is involved in reward processing, detailing each aspect of the three-tiered model depicted in the cover illustration. The name of the game for the OFC is reward values: outcome value, expected value, and negative reward prediction error (for when a reward outcome value is expected but does not occur). It is in the OFC that our sensuous experiences are converted to a common scale of reward value, allowing us to select between stimuli and generalize this information to future experiences. Rolls shows that the subjective pleasantness of stimuli is linearly related to the activation in the OFC and highlights that the OFC has a characteristic of sensory-specific satiety, an important trait of reward systems, which he posits could be used to help treat obesity. Following a detailed examination of the behavioral relevance of different OFC outputs (e.g., outputs to the basal ganglia are related to habitual responses, lateral hypothalamus and insula with autonomic changes, the cingulate cortex with action-outcome associations, and the medial prefrontal cortex with decision-making), Rolls concludes the chapter with a synopsis of research studies on each of the senses and how their reward value is mapped in the OFC and implicated in decision-making.
