Timing of medial prefrontal regions to reward

Our recent paper with the awesome Laurence Hunt investigates the timing of different brain responses to speciffic stimuli. Particularly, we were interested whether the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) process reward information at different times. To this end, we developed a novel way of analysing simultaneous EEG-fMRI data. We used single-trial fMRI responses from these regions to inform our EEG data to search for temporal relations. We found that vmPFC consistently preceded dmPFC activation.

Hauser TU*, Hunt LT*, Iannaccone R, Walitza S, Brandeis D, Brem S* & Dolan RJ* (2015). Temporally Dissociable Contributions of Human Medial Prefrontal Subregions to Reward-Guided Learning. J Neurosci 35(32):11209-11220.