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Symposia
Introduction
This symposium presents a sampler of recent work in decision-making at the interface between basic cognitive neuroscience and clinical neuropsychology. The goal is to provide a sense of the different directions this burgeoning field is taking, with an emphasis on clinical applications and insights. The study of the brain basis of decision-making has been something of a late arrival, growing up between traditional cold cognitive processes such as attention and reasoning and the hot areas of social and affective neuroscience. Indeed, it has been proposed that decision-making is the glue that binds motivational and executive processes, bringing the "why?" to the "what" and "where" of goal-directed human behavior (Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000; Fellows, 2007; Rahman, Sahakian, Cardinal, Rogers, & Robbins, 2001).
Decision-Making from Bedside to Bench
As with so many areas of human neuroscience, clinical observations provided early clues about the key neural substrates of decision-making. There is no escaping the influence of the "capricious and vacillating" post-frontal-injury Phineas Gage (Harlow, 1999), revived for modern audiences by the anatomical detective work of Hanna Damasio and colleagues (Damasio, Grabowski, Frank, Galaburda, & Damasio, 1994). More rigorous case reports, such as of the patient EVR (Eslinger & Damasio, 1985), provided a structure to decades of clinical observation in patients with frontal injury (see Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001 for review) by identifying a specific deficit in decision-making, and by focusing on the role of ventral frontal regions, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Group studies of patients with damage to these areas followed, accompanied by the development of novel experimental tasks aiming to specify the component processes of decision-making (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997; Rogers et al., 1999).
Reward Learning as a Window on Decision-Making
Those early efforts presaged the direction of the subsequent 15 years of human experimental work: One line of research considered decision-making in the context of trial-and-error reward learning (Murray, Wise, & Rhodes, 2011). This has been a very productive approach, making contact with a long history of research on conditioning in both rodents and non-human primates, and developing in parallel with important progress on the role of dopamine in such learning (Montague & Berns, 2002; Schultz, 1998). In...