Roles of medial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex in self-evaluation.
Empirical investigations of the relation of frontal lobe function to self-evaluation have mostly examined the evaluation of abstract qualities in relation to self versus other people. The present research furthers our understanding of frontal lobe involvement in self-evaluation by examining two processes that have not been widely studied by neuroscientists: on-line self-evaluations and correction of systematic judgment errors that influence self-evaluation. Although people evaluate their abstract qualities, it is equally important that perform on-line evaluations to assess the success of their behavior in a particular situation. In addition, self-evaluations of task performance are sometimes overconfident because of systematic judgment errors. What role do the neural regions associated with abstract self-evaluations and decision bias play in on-line evaluation and self-evaluation bias? In this fMRI study, self-evaluation in two reasoning tasks was examined; one elicited overconfident self-evaluations of performance because of salient but misleading aspects of the task and the other was free from misleading aspects. Medial PFC (mPFC), a region associated with self-referential processing, was generally involved in on-line self-evaluations but not specific to accurate or overconfident evaluation. Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activity, a region associated with accurate nonsocial judgment, negatively predicted individual differences in overconfidence and was negatively associated with confidence level for incorrect trials.
Beer
Jennifer S
JS
Department of Psychology, University of Texas, 1 University Station A8000, Austin, TX 78712, USA. beer@mail.utexas.edu
Lombardo
Michael V
MV
Bhanji
Jamil Palacios
JP
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D012649:Self Concept; D055815:Young Adult