The organization and dynamics of corticostriatal pathways link the medial orbitofrontal cortex to future decisions

Accurately making a decision in the face of incongruent options increases the efficiency of making similar congruency decisions in the future. This adaptive process is modulated by reward, suggesting that ventral corticostriatal circuits may contribute to the process of conflict adaptation. To evaluate this possibility, a group of healthy adults (N = 30) were tested using functional MRI (fMRI) while they performed a color-word Stroop task. In a conflict-related region of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), stronger BOLD responses predicted faster response times (RTs) on the next trial. More importantly, the degree of behavioral conflict adaptation on RTs was correlated with the magnitude of mOFC-RT associations on the previous trial, but only after accounting for network-level interactions with prefrontal and striatal regions. This suggests that conflict adaptation may rely on interactions between distributed corticostriatal circuits. The convergence of white matter projections fro ...