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The Journal of Neuroscience, June 25, 2008, 28(26):6750-6755; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1808-08.2008

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Calculating Consequences: Brain Systems That Encode the Causal Effects of Actions

Saori C. Tanaka,^1,3 Bernard W. Balleine,⁴ and John P. O'Doherty^1,2

¹Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences and ²Computation and Neural Systems Program, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, ³Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan, and ⁴Department of Psychology and the Brain Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90024

Correspondence should be addressed to John P. O'Doherty at the above address. Email: jdoherty{at}hss.caltech.edu

The capacity to accurately evaluate the causal effectiveness of our actions is key to successfully adapting to changing environments. Here we scanned subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they pressed a button to earn money as the response–reward relationship changed over time. Subjects' judgments about the causal efficacy of their actions reflected the objective contingency between the rate of button pressing and the amount of money they earned. Neural responses in medial orbitofrontal cortex and dorsomedial striatum were modulated as a function of contingency, by increasing in activity during sessions when actions were highly causal compared with when they were not. Moreover, medial prefrontal cortex tracked local changes in action–outcome correlations, implicating this region in the on-line computation of contingency. These results reveal the involvement of distinct brain regions in the computational processes that establish the causal efficacy of actions, providing insight into the neural mechanisms underlying the adaptive control of behavior.

Key words: goal-directed behavior; contingency; causality; free-operant conditioning; fMRI; prefrontal cortex

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Received Nov. 28, 2007; accepted May 20, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to John P. O'Doherty at the above address. Email: jdoherty{at}hss.caltech.edu

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