The role of the orbitofrontal cortex in adaptive behaviour   Dr. Giorgio Coricelli (Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Bron, France.) Dr. Francesco P. Battaglia (Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.)

Cognitive neuroscience is beginning to integrate factors such as preferences, emotion and social context in the study of decision making, using a range of mutually informative approaches from behavioural experiments, neurophysiology and functional neuroimaging. The present symposium adopts such a neuroeconomics perspective on decision making, asking how humans and other animals represent values and consequently influence their choices. The orbitofrontal cortex has important reciprocal connections with cortical and subcortical areas of the brain, thus appears to be at the interface of emotion and cognition. Converging neuroscientific evidences show how the orbitofrontal cortex is involved in representing the relative reward values (i.e. preferences), and the affective value of reinforcers; thus playing a fundamental role in complex and adaptive behaviour. Lesions in this brain area determine severe impairments in individual and social decision making. The symposium is aimed to discuss the unique and integrative role of the orbitofrontal cortex in adaptive behaviour, reporting evidence across species based on the use of neurophysiological and neuroimaging methodologies.  Antoine Bechara: Decision-making after frontal lobe injuries. John O'Doherty: fMRI studies on the role of the orbitofrontal cortex in decision making. Matt Roesch: The impact of time-discounted reward on neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex and ventral tegmental area. Camillo Padoa-Schioppa: Neuronal encoding of economic value in orbitofrontal cortex.