Economic and social values in the brain: evidence from lesions to the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Making good economic and social decisions is essential for individual and social welfare. Decades of research have provided compelling evidence that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is associated with dramatic personality changes and impairments in economic and social decision-making. However, whether the vmPFC subserves a unified mechanism in the social and non-social domains remains unclear.

Extension of the Clinicoradiologic Spectrum of Newly Described End-Truncating Variations.

Objectives: To refine the clinical spectrum of a very recently identified phenotype associated with end-truncating pathogenic variations.

Methods: Detailed clinical, neuropsychological, and MRI investigation of 6 patients from 2 unrelated families segregating end-truncating variations.

Results: All patients harbored end-truncating pathogenic variation.

Effort avoidance as a core mechanism of apathy in frontotemporal dementia.

Apathy is a core symptom in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). It is defined by the observable reduction in goal-directed behaviour, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. According to decision theory, engagement in goal-directed behaviour depends on a cost-benefit optimization trading off the estimated effort (related to the behaviour) against the expected reward (related to the goal).