title: Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia patients do not succumb to the Allais paradox.
abstract: The Allais Paradox represents one of the earliest empirical challenges to normative models of decision-making, and suggests that choices in one part of a gamble may depend on the possible outcome in another, independent, part of the gamble-a violation of the so-called "independence axiom." To account for Allaisian behavior, one well-known class of models propose that individuals' choices are influenced not only by possible outcomes resulting from one's choices, but also the anticipation of regret for foregone options. Here we test the regret hypothesis using a population of patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), a clinical population known to present ventromedial prefrontal cortex dysfunctions and associated with impaired regret processing in previous studies of decision-making. Compared to matched controls and Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, we found a striking diminution of Allaisian behavior among bvFTD patients. These results are consistent with the regret hypothesis and furthermore suggest a crucial role for prefrontal regions in choices that typically stands in contradiction with a basic axiom of rational decision-making.
authors.affiliation: Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, France.
authors.forename: Maxime
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bertoux
authors.affiliation: Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, France ; Swiss Centre in Affective Sciences, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Cova
authors.affiliation: Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière, INSERM UMRS 975, Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière Paris, France.
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pessiglione
authors.affiliation: Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, France ; Neuroeconomics Laboratory, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Ming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hsu
authors.affiliation: Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière, INSERM UMRS 975, Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière Paris, France.
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Dubois
authors.affiliation: Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, France ; LEMMA, Université Panthéon-Assas Paris, France.
authors.forename: Sacha
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bourgeois-Gironde
keywords: Allais paradox; anticipated regret; emotions; frontotemporal dementia; rationality