Viewing orbitofrontal cortex contributions to decision-making through the lens of object recognition

Decision neuroscience research has consistently implicated orbitofrontal and adjacent ventromedial prefrontal cortex in value-based decision-making. These areas are thought to reflect subjective value, a generic indicator of the personal motivational relevance of different options that allows them to be compared on a common scale. There are a number of unanswered questions arising from this model. We review findings from studies in patients with focal damage to the ventral frontal lobe that led us to reconsider how decision options are evaluated, applying perspectives from research on object recognition in the ventral visual stream. While decision-making is often approached from an abstract economic perspective in the lab, most of our everyday decisions, whether about food, goods, or people, are between directly perceived complex objects made up of multiple value-predictive attributes. It is not clear how multiple attributes are integrated to produce a global value estimate. We know the objects themselves are represented in the ventral visual stream at different levels of complexity, ranging from individual features to unique combinations of such features, but what about the values of those objects? Here, we suggest distinctions between configural and elemental evaluation echoing distinctions in visual processing. We discuss evidence that orbitofrontal-ventromedial prefrontal cortex is not required for all value-based decisions, but rather is specifically critical for recognizing value when it is predicted by configural relationships between attributes. We also consider how this perspective connects with emerging views of orbitofrontal cortex as an abstract cognitive map, and the debate on whether subjective value is a neurobiologically meaningful construct. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).