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Lesions to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex selectively impair reasoning about emotional material.

ABSTRACT: While it is widely accepted that lesions to orbital prefrontal cortex lead to emotion related disruptions and poor decision-making, there is very little patient data on this issue involving actual logical reasoning tasks. We tested patients with circumscribed, focal lesions largely confined to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex (BA 10 & 11) (N=17) on logical reasoning tasks involving neutral and emotional content, and compared their performance to that of an age and education-matched normal control group (N=22) and a posterior lesion control group (N=24). Our results revealed a significant group by content interaction driven by a selective impairment in the polar/orbital prefrontal cortex group compared to healthy normal controls and to the parietal patient group, in the emotional content reasoning trials. Subsequent analyses of congruent and incongruent reasoning trials indicated that this impairment was driven by the poor performance of patients with polar/orbital lesions in the incongruent trials. We conclude that the polar/orbital prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in filtering emotionally charged content from the material before it is passed on to the reasoning system in lateral/dorsal regions of prefrontal cortex. Where unfiltered content is passed to the reasoning engine, either as a result of pathology (as in the case of our patients) or as a result of individual differences, reasoning performance suffers.

SUBMITTER: Goel V

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5496820 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Lesions to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex selectively impair reasoning about emotional material.

Goel Vinod V Lam Elaine E Smith Kathleen W KW Goel Amit A Raymont Vanessa V Krueger Frank F Grafman Jordan J

Neuropsychologia 20170303

While it is widely accepted that lesions to orbital prefrontal cortex lead to emotion related disruptions and poor decision-making, there is very little patient data on this issue involving actual logical reasoning tasks. We tested patients with circumscribed, focal lesions largely confined to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex (BA 10 & 11) (N=17) on logical reasoning tasks involving neutral and emotional content, and compared their performance to that of an age and education-matched normal control ...[more]

PMID: 28263798

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Project description:To answer the question of how brain pathology affects reasoning about negative emotional content, we administered a disjunctive logical reasoning task involving arguments with neutral content (e.g. Either there are tigers or women in NYC, but not both; There are no tigers in NYC; There are women in NYC) and emotionally laden content (e.g. Either there are pedophiles or politicians in Texas, but not both; There are politicians in Texas; There are no pedophiles in Texas) to 92 neurological patients with focal lesions to various parts of the brain. A Voxel Lesion Symptom Mapping (VLSM) analysis identified 16 patients, all with lesions to the orbital polar prefrontal cortex (BA 10 & 11), as being selectively impaired in the emotional reasoning condition. Another 17 patients, all with lesions to the parietal cortex, were identified as being impaired in the neutral content condition. The reasoning scores of these two patient groups, along with 23 matched normal controls, underwent additional analysis to explore the effect of belief bias. This analysis revealed that the differences identified above were largely driven by trials where there was an incongruency between the believability of the conclusion and the validity of the argument (i.e. valid argument/false conclusion or invalid argument/true conclusion). Patients with lesions to polar orbital prefrontal cortex underperformed in incongruent emotional content trials and over performed in incongruent neutral content trials (compared to both normal controls and patients with parietal lobe lesions). Patients with lesions to parietal lobes underperformed normal controls (at a trend level) in neutral trials where there was a congruency between the believability of the conclusion and the validity of the argument (i.e. valid argument/true conclusion or invalid argument/false conclusion). We conclude that lesions to the polar orbital prefrontal cortex (i) prevent these patients from enjoying any emotionally induced cognitive boost, and (ii) block the belief bias processing route in the neutral condition. Lesions to parietal lobes result in a generalized impairment in logical reasoning with neutral content.

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Lesions to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex selectively impair reasoning about emotional material.

Publications

Lesions to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex selectively impair reasoning about emotional material.

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