Impaired awareness of action-outcome contingency and causality during healthy ageing and following ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions.

ABSTRACT: Detecting causal relationships between actions and their outcomes is fundamental to guiding goal-directed behaviour. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has been extensively implicated in computing these environmental contingencies, via animal lesion models and human neuroimaging. However, whether the vmPFC is critical for contingency learning, and whether it can occur without subjective awareness of those contingencies, has not been established. To address this, we measured response adaption to contingency and subjective awareness of action-outcome relationships in individuals with vmPFC lesions and healthy elderly subjects. We showed that in both vmPFC damage and ageing, successful behavioural adaptation to variations in action-outcome contingencies was maintained, but subjective

SUBMITTER: O'Callaghan C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6562272 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature