ReviewPrefrontal Cortex and Impulsive Decision Making
Section snippets
Economic Decision Making
In general, outcomes from a particular action might vary depending on the state of the decision maker's environment. For relatively simple types of decision making, the relationship between actions and their outcomes might be fully known, but often the relationship among the environment, action, and outcomes might change dynamically and might not be known completely. Nevertheless, formal analyses of decision making tend to share two common features. First, a set of available actions from which
Impulsivity and Temporal Discounting
Impulsive decision making can be viewed as a failure to take certain types of temporal factors into account appropriately. However, impulsivity is not a unitary concept and includes several distinct cases in which time is handled suboptimally. For economic decision making, impulsivity refers to the tendency to weigh immediate outcomes strongly and to discount the value of delayed rewards precipitously (13, 14, 15, 25). As previously described, humans and animals tend to prefer an immediate but
Neural Basis of Temporal Discounting
Intertemporal choice behaviors are relatively well-described by the models of temporal discounting. Therefore, the neural substrates of intertemporal choice should somehow integrate the information about the magnitude and delay of reward expected from each option. Indeed, the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals obtained from the medial frontal cortex and ventral striatum in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies are correlated with the temporally discounted values of rewards
Conclusions
Impulsivity is often associated with a number of mental illnesses, ranging from ADHD (94) to substance abuse (95). Although this label applies to a set of heterogeneous behavioral features, they are related because impulsive behaviors are suboptimally tuned along certain temporal dimensions. For intertemporal choice, impulsivity implies placing too much weight on immediate outcomes, whereas other types of impulsivity result from the premium on speed rather than accuracy of responses or failures
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