41
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Money for nothing — Atrophy correlates of gambling decision making in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Neurodegenerative patients show often severe everyday decision making problems. Currently it is however not clear which brain atrophy regions are implicated in such decision making problems. We investigated the atrophy correlates of gambling decision making in a sample of 63 participants, including two neurodegenerative conditions (behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia — bvFTD; Alzheimer's disease — AD) as well as healthy age-matched controls. All participants were tested on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the behavioural IGT results were covaried against the T1 MRI scans of all participants to identify brain atrophy regions implicated in gambling decision making deficits. Our results showed a large variability in IGT performance for all groups with both patient groups performing especially poor on the task. Importantly, bvFTD and AD groups did not differ significantly on the behavioural performance of the IGT. However, by contrast, the atrophy gambling decision making correlates differed between bvFTD and AD, with bvFTD showing more frontal atrophy and AD showing more parietal and temporal atrophy being implicated in decision making deficits, indicating that both patient groups fail the task on different levels. Frontal (frontopolar, anterior cingulate) and parietal (retrosplenial) cortex atrophy covaried with poor performance on the IGT. Taken together, the atrophy correlates of gambling decision making show that such deficits can occur due to a failure of different neural structures, which will inform future diagnostics and treatment options to alleviate these severe everyday problems in neurodegenerative patients.

          Highlights

          ► bvFTD and AD patients are both impaired in gambling decision making. ► However, atrophy correlates for gambling decision making differ between groups. ► Poor performance in decision making covaried with frontal atrophy in bvFTD. ► Poor performance in decision making covaried with parietal/temporal atrophy in AD. ► Gambling decision deficits can occur due to atrophy in different brain regions.

          Related collections

          Most cited references56

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Neural correlates of decision variables in parietal cortex.

          Decision theory proposes that humans and animals decide what to do in a given situation by assessing the relative value of each possible response. This assessment can be computed, in part, from the probability that each action will result in a gain and the magnitude of the gain expected. Here we show that the gain (or reward) a monkey can expect to realize from an eye-movement response modulates the activity of neurons in the lateral intraparietal area, an area of primate cortex that is thought to transform visual signals into eye-movement commands. We also show that the activity of these neurons is sensitive to the probability that a particular response will result in a gain. When animals can choose freely between two alternative responses, the choices subjects make and neuronal activation in this area are both correlated with the relative amount of gain that the animal can expect from each response. Our data indicate that a decision-theoretic model may provide a powerful new framework for studying the neural processes that intervene between sensation and action.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Different contributions of the human amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex to decision-making.

            The somatic marker hypothesis proposes that decision-making is a process that depends on emotion. Studies have shown that damage of the ventromedial prefrontal (VMF) cortex precludes the ability to use somatic (emotional) signals that are necessary for guiding decisions in the advantageous direction. However, given the role of the amygdala in emotional processing, we asked whether amygdala damage also would interfere with decision-making. Furthermore, we asked whether there might be a difference between the roles that the amygdala and VMF cortex play in decision-making. To address these two questions, we studied a group of patients with bilateral amygdala, but not VMF, damage and a group of patients with bilateral VMF, but not amygdala, damage. We used the "gambling task" to measure decision-making performance and electrodermal activity (skin conductance responses, SCR) as an index of somatic state activation. All patients, those with amygdala damage as well as those with VMF damage, were (1) impaired on the gambling task and (2) unable to develop anticipatory SCRs while they pondered risky choices. However, VMF patients were able to generate SCRs when they received a reward or a punishment (play money), whereas amygdala patients failed to do so. In a Pavlovian conditioning experiment the VMF patients acquired a conditioned SCR to visual stimuli paired with an aversive loud sound, whereas amygdala patients failed to do so. The results suggest that amygdala damage is associated with impairment in decision-making and that the roles played by the amygdala and VMF in decision-making are different.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex.

              Following damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, humans develop a defect in real-life decision-making, which contrasts with otherwise normal intellectual functions. Currently, there is no neuropsychological probe to detect in the laboratory, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms responsible for this defect have resisted explanation. Here, using a novel task which simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty of premises and outcomes, as well as reward and punishment, we find that prefrontal patients, unlike controls, are oblivious to the future consequences of their actions, and seem to be guided by immediate prospects only. This finding offers, for the first time, the possibility of detecting these patients' elusive impairment in the laboratory, measuring it, and investigating its possible causes.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Neuroimage (Amst)
                Neuroimage (Amst)
                NeuroImage : Clinical
                Elsevier
                2213-1582
                4 February 2013
                4 February 2013
                2013
                : 2
                : 263-272
                Affiliations
                [a ]Neuroscience Research Australia, Sydney, Australia
                [b ]University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris VI, Sorbonne Universités, Paris, France
                [c ]ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Sydney, Australia
                [d ]School of Medical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author at: Neuroscience Research Australia, PO Box 1165, Sydney, Australia. Tel.: + 61 2 9399 1816. m.hornberger@ 123456neura.edu.au
                Article
                S2213-1582(13)00013-2
                10.1016/j.nicl.2013.01.011
                3778267
                24179781
                3bc0a260-e739-4c10-a957-3c76c210a145
                © 2012 The Authors

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 13 December 2012
                : 15 January 2013
                : 28 January 2013
                Categories
                Article

                behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia,alzheimer's disease,voxel-based morphometry,gambling decision making,iowa gambling task

                Comments

                Comment on this article