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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 18, 2026

Online Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of Dorsomedial and Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Cognition Decision Making, and Cognitive Dissonance

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Learning-induced plasticity in medial prefrontal cortex predicts preference malleability.

Mona M Garvert¹, Michael Moutoussis¹, Zeb Kurth-Nelson²

¹Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, UK.

|January 23, 2015

Summary

Learning to understand another person's preferences changes your own values in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This neural plasticity is driven by prediction errors, influencing social learning and preference malleability.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Social Psychology

Background:

Neuronal plasticity underlies learning and memory.
Neural populations often support multiple representations.
Changes in one representation may affect others.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how learning another individual's values impacts self-value representations.
To explore the neural mechanisms driving value plasticity.
To understand the role of prediction errors in social learning.

Main Methods:

Human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with repetition suppression.
Behavioral tasks measuring preference shifts.
Analysis of neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and striatum.

Main Results:

Learning another's values induced plasticity in self-value representations within the mPFC.
A behavioral preference shift was observed, correlating with neural changes.
Striatal prediction errors, signaling discrepancies between others' choices and own preferences, drove this plasticity.
mPFC encodes agent-independent value representations, updated by prediction errors for multiple agents.

Conclusions:

Social learning dynamically updates subjective value representations in the mPFC.
Prediction errors serve as a key mechanism for updating value representations across different agents.
Representational similarity changes predict individual differences in preference malleability, illuminating social influence on beliefs and preferences.