Impulsive Decision Making After Focal Basal Ganglia Stroke in Humans
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1
University of Amsterdam, Spinoza Center for Neuroimaging, Netherlands
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2
Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute (RU/DI-BCB), Netherlands
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3
University of California, Berkeley, CognAc, United States
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4
University of Newcastle, Newcastle Cognition Lab, Australia
Making decisions frequently involves finding the right balance between speed and accuracy. When playing basketball, for example, the shooter may want to take time to prepare her shot, but then risks having the shot blocked. A speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) is ubiquitous in human performance, observed in a wide range of tasks in both everyday life and in the lab. In this study, we investigated the role of the basal ganglia (BG) in regulating the SAT. We used a moving dots task in which, on a trial-by-trial basis, the instructions emphasized either speed or accuracy. Our previous fMRI study with this task revealed that behavioral adjustment in response to the speed and accuracy cues was accompanied by modulation of the BOLD response in the BG (Forstmann et al., 2008). In the current experiment we tested patients with focal ischemic stroke centered in the BG and age-matched controls. The two groups performed similarly under speed stress. However, the BG patients exhibited less adjustment in performance when accuracy was stressed, resulting in faster responses and a trend toward lower accuracy. The reaction time distributions were fit by the Linear Ballistic Accumulator model (Brown & Heathcote, 2008), enabling us to derive parameters of interest not directly observable in the behavioral data. The parameter representing adjustment of response threshold was estimated to be lower in the patients than in controls. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that the BG are critical for regulating SAT in decision making. These findings have implications for the role of the BG in impulse control and, more generally, the idea that the BG globally inhibit multiple alternative actions, and selectively disinhibit a selected action.
Keywords:
Basal Ganglia,
Decision Making,
lesion,
linear ballistic accumulator model,
speed accuracy trade-off,
visuomotion detection task
Conference:
Decision Neuroscience From Neurons to Societies, Berlin, Germany, 23 Sep - 25 Sep, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Abstracts
Citation:
Winkel
J,
Ivry
RB,
Brown
S,
Cools
R and
Forstmann
BU
(2010). Impulsive Decision Making After Focal Basal Ganglia Stroke in Humans.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Decision Neuroscience From Neurons to Societies.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.82.00018
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Received:
16 Aug 2010;
Published Online:
07 Sep 2010.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Jasper Winkel, University of Amsterdam, Spinoza Center for Neuroimaging, Amsterdam, Netherlands, jasperwinkel@gmail.com