Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 69, Issue 12, 15 June 2011, Pages 1140-1146
Biological Psychiatry

Review
Prefrontal Cortex and Impulsive Decision Making

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.07.005Get rights and content

Impulsivity refers to a set of heterogeneous behaviors that are tuned suboptimally along certain temporal dimensions. Impulsive intertemporal choice refers to the tendency to forego a large but delayed reward and to seek an inferior but more immediate reward, whereas impulsive motor responses also result when the subjects fail to suppress inappropriate automatic behaviors. In addition, impulsive actions can be produced when too much emphasis is placed on speed rather than accuracy in a wide range of behaviors, including perceptual decision making. Despite this heterogeneous nature, the prefrontal cortex and its connected areas, such as the basal ganglia, play an important role in gating impulsive actions in a variety of behavioral tasks. Here, we describe key features of computations necessary for optimal decision making and how their failures can lead to impulsive behaviors. We also review the recent findings from neuroimaging and single-neuron recording studies on the neural mechanisms related to impulsive behaviors. Converging approaches in economics, psychology, and neuroscience provide a unique vista for better understanding the nature of behavioral impairments associated with impulsivity.

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

References (95)

  • R. Bogacz et al.

    The neural basis of the speed-accuracy tradeoff

    Trends Neurosci

    (2010)
  • B.J. Weber et al.

    The neural substrates of probabilistic and intertemporal decision making

    Brain Res

    (2008)
  • K. Ballard et al.

    Dissociable neural representations of future reward magnitude and delay during temporal discounting

    Neuroimage

    (2009)
  • M.R. Roesch et al.

    Encoding of time-discounted rewards in orbitofrontal cortex is independent of value representation

    Neuron

    (2006)
  • S. Kim et al.

    Prefrontal coding of temporally discounted values during intertemporal choice

    Neuron

    (2008)
  • A.R. Aron et al.

    Inhibition and the right inferior frontal cortex

    Trends Cogn Neurosci

    (2004)
  • K. Rubia et al.

    Mapping motor inhibition: Conjunctive brain activations across different versions of go/no-go and stop tasks

    Neuroimage

    (2001)
  • J.W. Mink

    The basal ganglia: Focused selection and inhibition of competing motor programs

    Prog Neurobiol

    (1996)
  • M.J. Frank

    Hold your horses: A dynamic computational role for the subthalamic nucleus in decision making

    Neural Netw

    (2006)
  • O. Hikosaka et al.

    Switching from automatic to controlled behavior: Cortico-basal ganglia mechanisms

    Trends Cogn Sci

    (2010)
  • A. Nambu et al.

    Functional significance of the cortico-subthalamo-pallidal “hyperdirect” pathway

    Neurosci Res

    (2002)
  • X.-J. Wang

    Decision making in recurrent neuronal circuits

    Neuron

    (2008)
  • C.A. Winstanley et al.

    Behavioral models of impulsivity in relation to ADHD: Translation between clinical and preclinical studies

    Clin Psychol Rev

    (2006)
  • J.L. Evenden

    Varieties of impulsivity

    Psychopharmacology

    (1999)
  • P.W. Glimcher

    The neurobiology of visual-saccadic decision making

    Annu Rev Neurosci

    (2003)
  • J.I. Gold et al.

    The neural basis of decision making

    Annu Rev Neurosci

    (2007)
  • H. Seo et al.

    Cortical mechanisms for reinforcement learning in competitive games

    Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci

    (2008)
  • G.S. Berns et al.

    Neurobiological substrates of dread

    Science

    (2006)
  • G. Loewenstein et al.

    Negative time preference

    Am Econ Rev

    (1991)
  • G.F. Loewenstein et al.

    Preferences for sequences of outcomes

    Psychol Rev

    (1993)
  • S. Frederick et al.

    Time discounting and time preference: A critical review

    J Econ Lit

    (2002)
  • L. Green et al.

    A discounting framework for choice with delayed and probabilistic rewards

    Psychol Bull

    (2004)
  • J. von Neumann et al.

    Theory of Games and Economic Behavior

    (1944)
  • D. Kahneman et al.

    Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk

    Econometrica

    (1979)
  • R.S. Sutton et al.

    Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

    (1998)
  • K.H. Britten et al.

    The analysis of visual motion: A comparison of neuronal and psychophysical performance

    J Neurosci

    (1992)
  • M.N. Shadlen et al.

    A computational analysis of the relationship between neuronal and behavioral responses to visual motion

    J Neurosci

    (1996)
  • R. Romo et al.

    Touch and go: Decision-making mechanisms in somatosensation

    Annu Rev Neurosci

    (2001)
  • D.R.J. Laming

    Information Theory of Choice-Reaction Times

    (1968)
  • J. Hwang et al.

    Temporal discounting and inter-temporal choice in rhesus monkeys

    Front Behav Neurosci

    (2009)
  • J.E. Mazur

    An adjusting procedure for studying delayed reinforcement

  • K.N. Kirby

    Bidding on the future: Evidence against normative discounting of delayed rewards

    J Exp Psychol Gen

    (1997)
  • G.J. Madden et al.

    Delay discounting of real and hypothetical rewards

    Exp Clin Psychopharmacol

    (2003)
  • G.J. Madden et al.

    Impulsive and self-control choices in opioid-dependent patients and non-drug-using control patients: Drug and monetary rewards

    Exp Clin Psychopharmacol

    (1997)
  • R.E. Vuchinich et al.

    Hyperbolic temporal discounting in social drinkers and problem drinkers

    Exp Clin Psychopharmacol

    (1998)
  • S.H. Mitchell

    Measures of impulsivity in cigarette smokers and non-smokers

    Psychopharmacology

    (1999)
  • K.N. Kirby et al.

    Heroin and cocaine abusers have higher discount rates for delayed rewards than alcoholics or non-drug-using controls

    Addiction

    (2004)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text