The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in reward valuation and future thinking during intertemporal choice

The paper investigates the effect of reward magnitude and episodic future thinking (EFT) cues on delay discounting (DD) in 12 patients with lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC patients) and 41 healthy controls. In the Standard condition, participants viewed pairs of monetary amounts (of different magnitude) and were asked to make hypothetical choices between smaller-immediate rewards and larger rewards available after a delay. In the EFT condition, participants imagined personal events to occur at the delays associated with the larger-delayed rewards. We found that DD was steeper in vmPFC patients compared to controls, and not modulated by reward magnitude. However, EFT cues reduced DD in vmPFC patients as well as controls. 

This dataset reports individual and group data on the subjective value of small and large rewards at the different task delays, the resulting area under the curve (AuC), and the number of inconsistent choices during DD. 

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