Summary: New research has revealed that damage to particular areas of the medial prefrontal cortex ( mPFC) causes more impulsivity and susceptibility to other people’s impulsive behavior. Individuals who had mPFC lesions were more likely to choose fast outcomes and to be influenced by those who made impulsive choices.
General hyperactivity and social susceptibility were individually assessed in unique regions of the mPFC. These findings provide new information into how brain injury affects decision-making and may have implications for better understanding economic decisions and misinformation.
Important Information
- More aggressive decisions are made because of injury to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
- Greater cultural impact: Dorsomedial cerebral cortex injury makes it more prone to impulsive behavior from others.
- Broader Repercussions: Researches provide a framework for understanding how mental structure affects decision-making and risk to external influences.
University of Birmingham
People who have damage to a particular area of their neurons are more prone to impulsivity, and recent research has shown that this injury also increases their risk of being influenced by others.
A research team’s findings in a new study, published in PLOS Biology,  , led to the association of damage to various parts of the medial prefrontal cortex ( mPFC) being influenced by other people’s impulsive decisions, while choosing a smaller reward sooner rather than waiting for a larger prize.
Individuals with head injury were consulted by the University of Birmingham, University of Oxford, and Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg to determine whether their tastes were more likely to be influenced by another person’s interests.
The team collaborated with 121 participants, of whom 33 had mPFC primary damage, 17 had brain lesions abroad, and 71 who were age 71 but had no brain damage.
To evaluate how aggressive people were in public, the researchers gave participants a number of choices. After that, they were given the same options and shown what other people would choose: some of them made quite impulsive choices, while others made more patient choices.
In general, those who had mPFC destruction were more aggressive. The team discovered that those individuals were also significantly more likely to be influenced by other people’s aggressive behaviors than those who practiced patience.  ,
Professor Patricia Lockwood, a mature related author of the study, and Professor Lockwood from the University of Birmingham, said:
The benefits are crucial because we learn what other people want each time, which affects our personal choices for what we want. We conducted an experiment to determine whether cultural influence occurs when people act more hastily or when they are restrained.
We believe that a specific part of the brain that is damaged makes you more influenced by others who act hastily and not when they act in a way that is more restricted.
We also discovered that brain injury to a different area makes you more aggressive in public, even before you have been influenced by someone else.
Our research concludes that having a distinct neurological basis, which could affect everything from how we interpret propaganda to how others can influence our own financial preferences, is supported by our study.
Patience
The group also mapped the size and location of abnormalities in the medial prefrontal cortex using a combination of scientific modeling and already-existing brain scans. The results indicate that the various mPFC areas are responsible for a particular set of aggressive influences.
The most significant influence on social influence on impulsivity was found to be the dorsomedial section, which is located at the top of the prefrontal cortex ( PFC).
Prior to cultural influence, lesions on the ventromedial part lower down in the PFC were found to have a greater affect on being aggressive in general.
The University of Birmingham’s Zhilin Su, the study’s lead artist, stated:
We were able to work with a sizable sample of individuals who had medial prefrontal cortex damage that was unusually particular. This gave us the opportunity to examine very particularly whether this harm might have an impact on how people are influenced by others.
We discovered that people who suffered harm were not only much more influenced by other people’s selections, but also much more able to learn about them.
About this information from the TBI and aggression research
Publisher: Tim Mayo
Source: University of Birmingham
Contact: Tim Mayo – University of Birmingham
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Open access to original analysis
By Patricia Lockwood and colleagues,” Dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex tumors differently affect social impact and historical devaluing.” PLOS Biology
Abstract
Differential social influence and historical lowering are affected by dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex tumors.
In imaging studies, the medial prefrontal cortex ( mPFC) has long been associated with economic and social decision-making.
There are numerous debates about whether the different ventral mPFC (vmPFC) and dorsal mPFC ( dmPFC) regions have distinct functions or whether a gradient supports social and nonsocial cognition.
We tested an unusually large sample of rare participants with focal damage to the mPFC ( total , N , = 121 ), lesions elsewhere ( N , = 17 ), and healthy controls ( total , N , = 121 ) ( total , N , = 121 ).
Participants completed a historical discounting task to determine their fundamental preferences for discounting before learning about those of two different people, one who was more impulsive and another who was more patient.
After understanding other people’s financial preferences, we compared baseline lowering and susceptibility to social impact using Bayesian mathematical models.
Compared to good controls, mPFC destruction increased sensitivity to aggressive social influence and an increase in overall sensitivity to social influence compared to lesions abroad.
Importantly, voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) of computational parameters demonstrated that damage to the dmPFC (area 9, permutation-based threshold-free cluster enhancement ( TFCE )  , p , <, 0.025 ) was specifically attributed to this heightened susceptibility to social influence.
In contrast, lesions in the vmPFC (areas 13 and 25 ) and ventral striatum were related to a preference for seeking more immediate rewards ( permutation-based TFCE , p , <, 0.05 ) ( permutation-based TFCE , p , <, 0.05 )
We demonstrate that different ventral regions of the mPFC are involved in temporal discounting and that the dmPFC is intrinsically linked to susceptibility to social influence. These studies provide evidence of causality.
