Reward and Punishment: investigating cortico-bulbar excitability to disclose the value of goods

A continuing challenge for neuroscientists is to develop new conceptual tools and methodologies for understanding, predicting and modelling the influences of rewarding/punishing outcomes on human behaviour and decision making. Reinforcement shapes behaviours from the most primitive (fight/flight, ingest/regurgitate, approach/avoid) to complex (buy/sell). Understanding the neural processes underlying reinforcement is critical for understanding economic and social decision-making. Moreover, comprehension of deranged processing and responses to reinforcing stimuli is crucial across a range of psychology fields and society as a whole, including psychiatric and neurological illness, eating disorders, criminality and sociopathy (Vicario and Crescentini, 2012). Neuroimaging methods have provided important information on the neural network underlying reward processing. Studies have shown that the reward value (O\u2019Doherty et al., 2000) and the subjective pleasantness (Kringelbach et al., 2003) of food and non-food stimuli are reflected in the activity of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). This region has been implicated in computing the hedonic value of food and in response to reward predicting signals in humans (Anderson et al., 2003). The OFC is part of a widespread network that includes also several subcortical regions such as hypothalamus, amygdala, dopaminergic midbrain, as well as parts of the basal ganglia including the ventral and dorsal striatum (Kringelbach et al., 2005). The network includes also cortical regions such as the insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) which are reciprocally connected to the OFC and to hypothalamic and brainstem pathways mediating autonomic and visceral control (Freeman et al., 2000)