While activation of the posterior medial OFC in the processing of outcomes devoid of any tangible reward value [41] and early signaling of behaviorally relevant absence of outcomes at 200 300 ms in such a task [42] has been observed before, the processing of behavioral relevance and hedonic loss of the absence of anticipated rewards have never been directly compared.
Active choice also influences the processing of outcomes.
Moreover, cues may also activate images of each other (Larkin et al. 1998) or may acquire perceptual processing of outcomes in their absence (Holland 1990).
Playing for more preferred compared to less preferred chocolate bars is likely associated with a higher interest in the game outcome, which might cause a stronger attention focus on the outcome situation (visual perception and processing of the outcome).
Collectively, these regions are believed to form a neural circuit that functions to facilitate putative stages in the decision-making process, including evaluation of available alternatives, selection and performance of an action, and processing of the outcome [10], [13], [17], [18].
In addition, there is functional neuroimaging evidence that the ventral striatum region showed decreasing activations in the processing of loss outcome (Delgado et al. 2000), and that the VTA/SN and NA regions were not involved in the processing of negative-reward information (Liu et al. 2007).
Here, activation of the vmPFC appears to play an important role: As described above, additional activation of this region was observed during processing of predicted outcomes (Fig. 4C).
The aim of this analysis was to see how activity in ventral striatum and dorsolateral PFC related to activity in ventromedial PFC during processing of gain outcomes, and whether this differed across groups.
The finding underscores the idea that, in a situation in which the non-occurrence of reward may or may not have behavioral relevance, as in our task, the electrocortical response to the behaviorally relevant absence of an outcome overrides the effect of the simple processing of a disadvantageous outcome.
