Ventromedial Frontal Cortex Is Critical for Guiding Attention to Reward-Predictive Visual Features in XXXX .

@entity75 @entity1 @entity227 @entity550
Adaptively interacting with our environment requires extracting information that will allow us to successfully predict reward. This can be a challenge, particularly when there are many candidate cues, and when rewards are probabilistic. Recent work has demonstrated that visual attention is allocated to stimulus features that have been associated with reward on previous trials. The ventromedial frontal lobe ( @entity550 ) has been implicated in learning in dynamic environments of this kind, but the mechanism by which this region influences this process is not clear. Here, we hypothesized that the @entity550 plays a critical role in guiding attention to reward-predictive stimulus features based on feedback. We tested the effects of @entity75 in @entity1 subjects on a @entity227 in which subjects were primed to attend to task-irrelevant colors associated with different levels of reward, incidental to the search task. Consistent with previous work, we found that distractors had a greater influence on reaction time when they appeared in colors associated with high reward in the previous trial compared with colors associated with low reward in healthy control subjects and @entity1 with prefrontal damage sparing the @entity550 . However, this reward modulation of attentional priming was absent in @entity1 with @entity75 . Thus, an intact @entity550 is necessary for directing attention based on experience with cue-reward associations. We suggest that this region plays a role in selecting reward-predictive cues to facilitate future learning. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: There has been a swell of interest recently in the @entity550 ( @entity550 ), a brain region critical to associative learning. However, the underlying mechanism by which this region guides learning is not well understood. Here, we tested the effects of damage to this region in @entity1 on a task in which rewards were linked incidentally to visual features, resulting in trial-by-trial attentional priming. Controls and subjects with prefrontal damage sparing the @entity550 showed normal reward priming, but @entity550 -damaged @entity1 did not. This work sheds light on a potential mechanism through which this region influences behavior. We suggest that the @entity550 is necessary for directing attention to reward-predictive visual features based on feedback, facilitating future learning and decision-making.
