What lesion studies have taught us about frontal lobe contributions to decision-making

As a relatively new field within cognitive neuroscience, neuroeconomics has tackled the general goal of defining the relevant component processes underlying evaluation, value-based decision-making, and related aspects of motivated (“economic”) behavior, and determining the brain mechanisms that underlie those processes. Studies of humans with acquired focal brain injury contribute evidence about the causal contribution of the affected brain region to the behavior or cognitive process under study. Clinically, this method has guided localizationist understandings of brain function that are the basis of neurology and neuropsychology. Experimentally, it can be especially useful for validating brain-based models of the component processes of complex behavior, such as the behaviors that are the focus of neuroeconomics. Inferentially, evidence from lesion studies has particular strengths, supporting claims that a region is (or is not) necessary for a particular process, as well as demonstrating that putatively distinct component processes are, in fact, dissociable. This chapter provides an overview of findings from human lesion research relevant to neuroeconomics, with a focus on the frontal lobes. The strengths and weaknesses of the methodology are discussed, the more robust, replicated findings are highlighted, examples of how this work has helped to increasingly refine accounts of regional frontal lobe contributions to economic behavior are provided, and promising future directions are suggested.