Activation areas in the brain for specific kinds of OCD:
washing, checking, hoarding, aversive
“Patients demonstrated significantly greater activation than controls in bilateral ventromedial prefrontal regions and right caudate nucleus (washing);
putamen/globus pallidus, thalamus, and dorsal cortical areas (checking);
left precentral gyrus and right orbitofrontal cortex (hoarding);
and left occipitotemporal regions (aversive, symptom-unrelated).”
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OFC: What do I do with this new information? Does it have value?
“The OFC is also frequently associated with certain types of decision-making. For example, it has been hypothesized that the OFC is important in decisions that must be made by comparing the relative value among several options to decide which is preferable. Patients with damage to the OFC have been found to display deficits in gambling tasks that require them to consider the usefulness of different gambling strategies to maximize the potential of earning fake money. A study in monkeys also found that neuronal firing patterns in the OFC changed depending on the value of a juice reward the monkeys were offered (e.g. some neurons were activated more in response to being offered a rewarding Kool-Aid drink than in response to water).
Later research has suggested the OFC may have a more specific role than just value-based decision-making; it has been hypothesized the OFC may be necessary for making predictions about decisions based on newly-learned information. In other words, the OFC might not be needed to form a simple association between a stimulus and a reward, but may be necessary if something changes about the stimulus and an estimate must be made about its potential to still provide a reward.”
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