TY  - JOUR
A1  - Heekeren, Hauke R.
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Schmidt, Helge
A1  - Prehn, Kristin
A1  - Schwintowski, Hans-Peter
A1  - Villringer, Arno
T1  - Influence of bodily harm on neural correlates of semantic and moral decision-making
N2  - Moral decision-making is central to everyday social life because the evaluation of the actions of another agent or our own actions made with respect to the norms and values guides our behavior in a community. There is previous evidence that the presence of bodily harm-even if irrelevant for a decision-may affect the decision-making, process. While recent neuroimaging studies found a common neural substrate of moral decision-making, the role of bodily harm has not been systematically studied so far. Here we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how behavioral and neural correlates of semantic and moral decision-making processes are modulated by the presence of direct bodily harm or violence in the stimuli. Twelve participants made moral and semantic decisions about sentences describing actions of agents that either contained bodily harm or not and that could easily be judged as being good or bad or correct/incorrect, respectively. During moral and semantic decision-making, the presence of bodily harm resulted in faster response times (RT) and weaker activity in the temporal poles relative to trials devoid of bodily harm/violence, indicating a processing advantage and reduced processing depth for violence-related linguistic stimuli. Notably, there was no increase in activity in the amygdala and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) in response to trials containing bodily harm. These findings might be a correlate of limited generation of the semantic and emotional context in the anterior temporal poles during the evaluation of actions of another agent related to violence that is made with respect to the norms and values guiding our behavior in a community. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
Y1  - 2005
SN  - 1053-8119
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mell, Thomas
A1  - Heekeren, Hauke R.
A1  - Marschner, Alexander
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Villringer, Arno
A1  - Reischies, Friedel M.
T1  - Effect of aging on stimulus-reward association learning
N2  - The flexible learning of stimulus-reward associations when required by situational context is essential for everyday behavior. Older adults experience a progressive decline in several cognitive functions and show deficiencies in neuropsychological tasks requiring flexible adaptation to external feedback, which could be related to impairments in reward association learning. To study the effect of aging on stimulus-reward association learning 20 young and 20 older adults performed a probabilistic object reversal task (pORT) along with a battery of tests assessing executive functions and general intellectual abilities. The pORT requires learning and reversing associations between actions and their outcomes. Older participants collected fewer points, needed more trials to reach the learning criterion, and completed less blocks successfully compared to young adults. This difference remained statistically significant after correcting for the age effect of other tests assessing executive functions. This suggests that there is an age-related difference in reward association learning as measured using the pORT, which is not closely related to other executive functions with respect to the age effect. In human aging, structural alterations of reward detecting structures and functional changes of the dopaminergic as well as the serotonergic system might contribute to the deficit in reward association learning observed in this study. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Y1  - 2005
SN  - 0028-3932
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Marschner, Alexander
A1  - Mell, Thomas
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Villringer, Arno
A1  - Reischies, Friedel M.
A1  - Heekeren, Hauke R.
T1  - Reward-based decision-making and aging
Y1  - 2005
SN  - 0361-9230
ER  -