The Relationship Among Tasks Purported to Measure Orbitofrontal Functioning

The study of decision making is of interest in the clinical application of psychological principles. Historically, this included how emotions impacted decisions and behaviors but the focus gradually shifted to focus on cognitive aspects. Recently, third wave behavioral therapies have reinvigorated the study of how decision making is affected by both cognitive and emotional processes. How we make decisions is an important and debatable question. One way to address this question is examine analog neurobehavioral tasks thought to be related to functioning of specific neurological areas. Many studies have implicated areas of the frontal lobe, limbic system, and basal ganglia in constructs such as decision making, emotion, personality, and self regulation. Myriad neurobehavioral tasks have been developed to measure these constructs based on varied fields of study such as cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and social cognition. These include the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), The Awareness of Social Inference Task (TASIT; McDonald, Flanagan, Martin, & Saunders, 2004), and delay and probability discounting tasks (Rachlin, Raineri, & Cross, 1991). While these measures all purport to assess the functioning of the same neurological areas, they have never been looked at in concert to see how they may relate to each other. The purpose of the present investigation is to further elucidate the relationships that may exist between neurobehavioral tests developed from different perspectives that purport to measure the functioning of similar neurological areas (vmPFC/OFC and limbic system) as they relate to decision making.