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Orbitofrontal cortex

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a heterogeneous region of the prefrontal cortex situated on the ventral surface of the frontal lobe, directly above the orbits of the eyes in primates, including humans.^[1] It integrates sensory inputs with emotional and reward-related information to facilitate adaptive decision-making and behavioral flexibility.^[2] The OFC is anatomically divided into medial (primarily Brodmann areas 11 and 13) and lateral (area 12 and 47/12) subregions, characterized predominantly by granular cortical layers that receive convergent projections from sensory cortices, limbic structures like the amygdala and hypothalamus, and subcortical areas such as the mediodorsal thalamus and ventral striatum.^[1]^[2] In terms of function, the medial OFC encodes the subjective reward value and pleasantness of stimuli, such as the taste or sight of food, contributing to the representation of positive affective states and economic decision-making.^[2] Conversely, the lateral OFC processes non-reward outcomes, punishments, and errors, enabling rapid reversal learning— the ability to update associations when environmental contingencies change—and inhibiting maladaptive behaviors.^[2]^[1] These processes support goal-directed actions by predicting the outcomes of choices and comparing their values on a common scale, integrating multisensory cues with motivational relevance.^[1] The OFC's extensive connectivity underscores its role in bridging cognition and emotion; it receives olfactory, gustatory, and visceral inputs while projecting to regions involved in executive control, such as the anterior cingulate cortex, to influence motivation and social behavior.^[2] Dysfunctions in the OFC have been implicated in psychiatric conditions, including depression—where altered connectivity disrupts reward processing—and disorders of impulse control, highlighting its importance in maintaining emotional regulation and flexible responding to social cues.^[2]^[1]

Anatomy

Location and boundaries

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) constitutes the ventral subdivision of the prefrontal cortex, occupying the basal surface of the frontal lobe immediately superior to the bony orbits of the eyes.^[3] This region forms the orbital aspect of the frontal lobe within the anterior cranial fossa, distinguishing it from the more dorsal prefrontal areas.^[4] The OFC is delimited anteriorly by the frontopolar cortex, posteriorly by the limen insulae and anterior insular cortex, medially by the olfactory sulcus, and laterally by the inferior frontal sulcus extending toward the lateral (Sylvian) fissure.^[4] It encompasses Brodmann areas 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 47, with area 11 broadly representing much of the orbital surface in early mappings, while areas 12, 13, 14, and the orbital portion of 47 define lateral and posterior extensions.^[5]^[4] In gross morphology, the orbital surface exhibits a characteristic pattern of gyri and sulci that subdivide the OFC into distinct convolutions. The four primary orbital gyri include the medial orbital gyrus (lateral to the olfactory sulcus and straight gyrus), anterior orbital gyrus (anterior to the H-shaped orbital sulcus), posterior orbital gyrus (posterior to the H-shaped sulcus), and lateral orbital gyrus (lateral to the sulcus).^[6] These are separated medially by the longitudinally oriented olfactory sulcus and more laterally by the H-shaped orbital sulcus, which comprises anterior and posterior limbs of the medial and lateral orbital sulci.^[7] This sulcal arrangement creates a compartmentalized structure that varies slightly across individuals but consistently delineates the OFC's ventral expanse.^[8] The nomenclature "orbitofrontal cortex" traces its origins to Korbinian Brodmann's seminal 1909 cytoarchitectonic atlas, where he first systematically mapped these ventral frontal regions based on cellular organization, later refined in his 1910 publication to include precise delineations of areas 11 through 14 and adjacent zones.^[9]^[10]

Subregions and cytoarchitecture

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is subdivided into medial and lateral sectors, with the medial OFC (mOFC) encompassing Brodmann areas 10m, 11m, and 12m primarily along the gyrus rectus and medial orbital gyrus, while the lateral OFC (lOFC) includes areas 47/12 on the lateral orbital gyrus.^[11] These divisions are delineated by sulcal landmarks such as the olfactory sulcus and transverse orbital sulcus, reflecting underlying functional specializations.^[4] An anterior-posterior distinction further refines this parcellation, with anterior regions extending toward the frontal pole and posterior regions bordering the temporal lobe and insula.^[12] Cytoarchitectonically, the OFC exhibits a gradient from granular to agranular organization, with area 10 classified as granular due to a well-developed layer IV rich in granule cells, areas 11 and 12 as dysgranular featuring a poorly differentiated and narrow layer IV, and areas 13 and 47 as agranular lacking a distinct layer IV altogether.^[13] Layer V is particularly prominent across subregions, containing large pyramidal neurons that contribute to output projections, while layers II and III show varying densities of smaller granule and pyramidal cells, respectively, with overall cortical width remaining narrow (approximately 2-3 mm).^[14] These laminar features support the paralimbic nature of the OFC, transitioning from isocortical anterior zones to more primitive posterior allocortical-like structures.^[15] In comparative terms, the human OFC displays a disproportionately larger mOFC relative to total prefrontal cortex volume compared to rodents, where the OFC constitutes a smaller fraction and lacks the extensive granular expansions seen in primates.^[16] Rodent OFC cytoarchitecture is predominantly agranular and dysgranular without clear homologues to human area 10, highlighting evolutionary expansions in human anterior regions for enhanced integration.^[17] Recent 2025 investigations have elucidated anterior-posterior gradients within the lOFC, revealing cytoarchitectonic differences such as denser layer III pyramidal cells anteriorly versus broader dysgranular features posteriorly, which correlate with specialized neural coding for uncertainty in value representations.^[18] These findings underscore laminar variations that may facilitate gaze-dependent comparisons in outcome evaluation.^[19]

Connectivity

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) receives diverse afferent inputs that integrate sensory, emotional, and cognitive information from multiple brain regions. Sensory afferents include direct projections from the olfactory bulb and gustatory cortex, as well as indirect inputs from visual and auditory association cortices in the temporal lobe, enabling the processing of multimodal sensory stimuli. Limbic structures provide key inputs, with dense projections from the amygdala conveying emotional valence and from the hippocampus via the entorhinal cortex supplying contextual and memory-related signals.^[20] Additional afferents originate from other prefrontal areas, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, supporting executive integration, while thalamic inputs from the mediodorsal nucleus relay subcortical regulatory signals essential for attention and arousal modulation.^[21] Efferent outputs from the OFC project to limbic and subcortical targets, facilitating bidirectional communication within reward and emotional circuits. These include projections to the amygdala for emotional reinforcement, the ventral striatum (particularly the nucleus accumbens) for motivation, the hypothalamus for autonomic regulation, the insula for interoceptive awareness, and the cingulate cortex for conflict monitoring.^[2] Reciprocal connections with sensory cortices, such as the inferior temporal and insular regions, enable top-down modulation of perceptual processing.^[22] The OFC participates in large-scale brain networks, with subregional differences shaping its roles. The medial OFC (mOFC) shows strong involvement in the default mode network, supporting internally directed cognition like autobiographical memory.^[23] In contrast, the lateral OFC (lOFC) contributes to the salience network, aiding in the detection and prioritization of behaviorally relevant stimuli.^[24] These connectivity patterns vary by subregion, with the mOFC displaying denser limbic ties than the lOFC, which emphasizes sensory-motor associations.^[23] Projections to and from the OFC are notably dense, as revealed by tract-tracing studies in primates, underscoring its hub-like role in integrating distributed signals. A 2025 study further elucidated hippocampal-OFC interactions, showing that outputs from the ventral subiculum suppress schema cell formation in the OFC, thereby gating the emergence of cognitive schemas during learning.^[25]

Functions

Reward processing and valuation

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a central role in representing the subjective value of rewards, with neurons encoding key attributes such as reward magnitude, probability, and overall expected value. Single-unit recordings in primates have revealed that OFC neurons respond to the anticipated reward value during decision tasks, integrating magnitude and probability to form a unified signal of expected utility.^[26]^[27] This encoding is abstract and independent of specific sensory modalities, allowing the OFC to generalize value representations across diverse rewards like food, money, or social stimuli.^[28] For instance, in economic choice paradigms, OFC activity scales with the subjective attractiveness of options, reflecting a computation of expected utility that guides valuation.^[29] A key mechanism for updating these value representations is demonstrated in the reinforcer devaluation paradigm, where the value of a reward is reduced (e.g., by selective satiation), and OFC activity shifts to reflect the diminished incentive, promoting avoidance of devalued actions. Lesion and inactivation studies in rodents and primates show that disrupting OFC function impairs this updating, leading to perseveration on devalued reinforcers despite changes in their hedonic value.^[30]^[31] Recent electrophysiological work in rats further illustrates the dynamic nature of this process: upon devaluation in an odor discrimination task, OFC neurons initially suppress responses to devalued cues, but activity spontaneously recovers after a brief delay to reinstate latent representations of the original outcome value, enabling flexible retrieval without ongoing behavioral demands.^[32] This rapid, transient updating underscores the OFC's capacity for maintaining and accessing stored value information to support adaptive behavior. In economic decision-making, subregional specialization within the OFC contributes to value computation, with the medial OFC (mOFC) primarily tracking positive rewards and gains, while the lateral OFC (lOFC) encodes negative outcomes, losses, and non-rewards. Functional imaging and single-neuron studies confirm that mOFC activation increases with rewarding stimuli, correlating with expected positive utility, whereas lOFC activity heightens for aversive or low-value options, facilitating the evaluation of trade-offs.^[2]^[33] This dissociation supports the computation of net expected utility by balancing positive and negative value signals. The OFC briefly interfaces with the striatum to translate these valuations into action selection, though its core role remains in value representation rather than motor execution.^[29] The hedonic dimension of reward processing in the OFC involves integrating sensory inputs related to pleasure and displeasure, particularly from gustatory and olfactory modalities. Multimodal convergence occurs in the OFC, where neurons respond to the pleasantness of tastes and smells, encoding the affective value beyond mere identity.^[34] For example, human neuroimaging shows OFC activation scaling with the subjective liking of food flavors, combining olfactory and gustatory signals to represent overall hedonic experience.^[35] This integration allows the OFC to update reward value based on sensory-specific devaluation, such as reduced pleasure from a familiar taste after satiation.^[36]

Decision-making and cognitive control

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a pivotal role in reversal learning, enabling the detection of changes in reward contingencies and the inhibition of previously reinforced responses to adapt behavior accordingly. Lesions to the OFC in both humans and non-human primates result in profound deficits in reversal tasks, where individuals fail to shift preferences away from stimuli that no longer predict rewards, often persisting with outdated choices despite negative outcomes.^[37] This impairment highlights the OFC's function in updating associative value representations rapidly, distinguishing it from initial learning processes that rely more on other prefrontal regions.^[38] In cognitive flexibility, the OFC integrates uncertainty into decision-making, particularly through interactions with the secondary motor cortex (M2), to guide reward-motivated choices in volatile environments. Recent studies demonstrate that neural activity in the OFC and M2 modulates choice and outcome representations based on uncertainty levels, allowing for adaptive adjustments in behavior when reward probabilities fluctuate.^[39] For instance, heightened uncertainty enhances OFC signaling to suppress rigid strategies, promoting exploration over exploitation in uncertain contexts. The OFC supports goal-directed behavior by maintaining task-space representations within a cognitive map framework, facilitating inference and generalization across related decision scenarios. Theories from 2023 to 2025 posit that the OFC encodes abstract relational structures, enabling predictions about unseen outcomes and flexible generalization to novel tasks without extensive relearning.00155-1) This representational capacity allows the OFC to recover latent information spontaneously, supporting efficient navigation through complex, changing goal landscapes.01028-0) Through its projections to the basal ganglia, particularly the ventral striatum, the OFC exerts inhibitory control to suppress impulsive actions and promote deliberate choice. Optogenetic manipulations of OFC-striatal pathways reveal that this circuit is essential for withholding premature responses in reward-guided tasks, with disruptions leading to heightened impulsivity in both adolescent and adult models.^[40] Reward signals from the OFC serve as key inputs to these basal ganglia loops, modulating the threshold for action initiation in uncertain or high-stakes decisions.^[41] The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a central role in affective processing by encoding the emotional valence of stimuli, with the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) primarily associated with positive affect and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) with negative affect.^[42] Functional neuroimaging studies have shown that mOFC activation correlates with rewarding or appetitive emotional responses, such as pleasure from positive social cues, while lOFC engagement increases during aversive or punishing emotional experiences, like disgust or fear.^[43] This valence-specific encoding facilitates adaptive behavioral adjustments in emotional contexts and links to higher-order social cognition, including theory of mind, where the OFC integrates emotional signals to infer others' mental states.^[44] Recent research highlights the involvement of mOFC-prefrontal-amygdala circuits in modulating distinct components of social behavior, such as affiliation and aggression. These circuits enable the OFC to weigh social risks and rewards, distinguishing cooperative from confrontational interactions in dynamic social environments.^[45] The OFC also contributes to norm compliance by detecting social violations and predicting punishment. Functional MRI evidence indicates that lateral OFC activation heightens during scenarios involving potential peer punishment for unfair actions, correlating positively with increased adherence to fairness norms (r = 0.67, p < 0.001).^[46] This region evaluates the severity of norm breaches, such as inequitable resource division in economic games, and signals the anticipated costs of retaliation, thereby reinforcing cooperative behavior.^[47] In interpersonal domains, the OFC supports moral decision-making and empathy, with lesion studies revealing profound deficits following damage. Patients with OFC lesions exhibit reduced emotional empathy and heightened utilitarian choices in moral dilemmas involving harm to others, prioritizing outcomes over deontological principles.^[48] Neuroimaging in children aged 4–8 years confirms bilateral OFC activation during empathy tasks, particularly for affective sharing of others' emotions, underscoring its role in early social moral development.^[49] These findings from lesion and imaging research illustrate how OFC integrity is essential for inhibiting socially inappropriate responses and fostering empathetic moral judgments.^[50]

Neural mechanisms

Electrophysiological properties

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) exhibits distinct neuronal firing patterns that encode reward-related information, characterized by phasic bursts in response to unexpected outcomes and tonic firing for sustained expectations. Single-unit recordings in rodents have revealed that OFC neurons display phasic excitations or inhibitions immediately following reward delivery, with firing rates scaling to the magnitude and valence of the outcome, thereby signaling prediction errors essential for updating value representations. Tonic activity in these neurons persists during anticipatory periods, reflecting sustained evaluation of expected rewards in decision contexts. Recent findings indicate that OFC neurons spontaneously reactivate representations of devalued outcomes during offline periods, suggesting a mechanism for maintaining latent value information despite behavioral suppression.^[51] Synaptic plasticity in the OFC, particularly in pathways connecting to the amygdala, underlies associative learning of reward values. Long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) have been observed in OFC-amygdala synapses, where high-frequency stimulation induces LTP to strengthen connections for positive reward associations, while low-frequency protocols elicit LTD to weaken links to devalued stimuli. These bidirectional changes facilitate the updating of emotional and motivational significance in learning tasks, as demonstrated in rodent models using optogenetic manipulations to isolate pathway-specific plasticity.^[52]^[53] Oscillatory activity in the OFC includes theta (4-8 Hz) and gamma (30-100 Hz) rhythms that synchronize during decision-making processes. Theta oscillations in the OFC coordinate with hippocampal theta to integrate spatial and value information, supporting the temporal organization of choices in reward-guided tasks. Gamma rhythms emerge during value comparison, with phase-amplitude coupling between theta and gamma modulating the encoding of action-outcome associations. Recent studies have shown that suppressing OFC theta activity disrupts these interactions, impairing adaptive decision-making by decoupling OFC from hippocampal inputs.^[54]^[55]^[56] Single-unit studies primarily from rodents demonstrate value-modulated neurons in the OFC, with subpopulations responding selectively to specific rewards or their expected values. In primates, similar patterns emerge, where OFC neurons encode economic value across sensory modalities during choice tasks. Human intracranial recordings confirm these findings, revealing high-gamma activity in OFC neurons that tracks subjective value during economic decisions, with firing rates correlating to chosen options' worth. These electrophysiological properties collectively underpin the OFC's role in valuation by providing a neural substrate for dynamic reward representation.^[51]^[57]^[58]

Neuroimaging findings

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have consistently demonstrated blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal activations in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) during reward anticipation, with signal intensity scaling positively with expected reward magnitude.^[59] These activations exhibit subregional specificity, where posterior OFC regions respond more to primary sensory rewards, while anterior regions integrate higher-order value computations.^[60] Investigations in 2025 have further delineated anterior-posterior distinctions, revealing complementary roles in outcome-guided behavior, with anterior lateral OFC supporting abstract valuation and posterior regions facilitating sensory-specific processing.^[61] Structural neuroimaging techniques, such as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography, have identified connectivity disruptions between the OFC and limbic structures like the anterior cingulate cortex in psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, characterized by reduced fractional anisotropy in white matter tracts.^[62] Volumetric analyses using structural MRI reveal subregional differences, with reduced gray matter volume in the right OFC observed in conditions involving comorbid depression and insomnia, potentially reflecting altered cortical thickness in medial and lateral subregions.^[63] These findings highlight OFC subregional vulnerabilities to volumetric atrophy in affective disorders.^[64] Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging has elucidated dopamine binding patterns in the OFC relevant to addiction models, showing reduced D2 receptor availability in methamphetamine abusers, which correlates with hypometabolism in orbitofrontal regions and impaired impulse control.^[65] Such dopamine dysregulation in the OFC contributes to compulsive behaviors in substance use disorders, as evidenced by blunted dopamine release during reward processing in detoxified alcoholics.^[66] Advances in 2025 have employed dynamic causal modeling (DCM) of fMRI data to probe effective connectivity between the OFC and hippocampus, demonstrating bidirectional interactions that facilitate schema updating during memory integration and adaptive learning.^[67] These models reveal strengthened OFC-hippocampal coupling during tasks requiring prior knowledge reconfiguration, underscoring the OFC's role in contextual value modulation.^[68] Neuroimaging findings in the OFC correlate with electrophysiological reward signals observed in single-unit recordings, providing convergent evidence for value encoding across scales.^[59]

Clinical significance

Effects of lesions and damage

Damage to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has been extensively studied through historical and modern case reports, revealing profound behavioral changes. The most famous example is Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman who in 1848 suffered a penetrating injury from a tamping iron that passed through his left frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal region, leading to dramatic personality alterations such as increased impulsivity, irritability, and poor social judgment while sparing basic cognitive functions like memory and intelligence.^[69] Modern patients with OFC lesions, such as those from trauma or surgical resections, exhibit similar profiles of disinhibition and impaired decision-making in real-life scenarios, often resulting in financial mismanagement or interpersonal conflicts despite intact intellectual abilities.^[70] For instance, patient E.L., who sustained bilateral prefrontal damage including the OFC in adulthood, displayed persistent social inappropriateness and risk-taking behaviors years post-injury, echoing Gage's transformation.^[71] A hallmark of OFC damage is the orbitofrontal syndrome, characterized by impulsivity, emotional blunting, and social dysfunction. Individuals with this syndrome often engage in socially inappropriate actions, such as tactless remarks or premature decisions, due to reduced inhibition of prepotent responses.^[72] Emotional blunting manifests as flattened affect and diminished empathy, contributing to strained relationships and isolation.^[73] Cognitively, initial learning of reward contingencies remains preserved, but reversal learning—adapting to changed outcomes—is severely impaired, as seen in tasks where patients fail to update strategies after feedback shifts.^[37] These deficits highlight the OFC's role in flexible behavior adjustment without affecting basic acquisition. Lesion effects vary by subregion, with medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) damage particularly disrupting adherence to social norms and prosocial behavior. Patients with mOFC lesions show increased antisocial tendencies, such as reduced cooperation in social exchanges, as evidenced by voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping in vmPFC cases where medial damage correlated with exploitative choices.^[74] In contrast, lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) lesions impair economic decision-making, leading to difficulties in value-based choices and credit assignment for outcomes, as demonstrated in studies of probabilistic learning where lOFC patients struggled with integrating rewards into future selections.^[75] Recent investigations into outcome-guided behaviors further underscore these dissociations, with lOFC involvement in adjusting economic preferences based on delayed feedback.^[76] Recovery from OFC lesions is partial and often involves compensatory recruitment of adjacent prefrontal areas, though complex decision-making deficits persist. Neuroplasticity allows undamaged regions, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, to partially restore inhibitory control over time, particularly in cases of early injury.^[77] However, longitudinal studies reveal enduring impairments in reversal learning and social judgment, with compensation limited by the OFC's unique connectivity to limbic structures.^[78] Behavioral assessments like the Iowa Gambling Task commonly reveal these residual effects, confirming the OFC's irreplaceable contributions to adaptive behavior.^[79]

Role in psychiatric disorders

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a central role in the pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), where hyperactivity within OFC-striatal circuits contributes to persistent intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated elevated directed influence from the OFC to the ventral striatum in unmedicated OCD patients, reflecting disrupted fronto-striato-thalamic loops that amplify error signals and habit formation.^[80] This hyperactivity is a key target for therapeutic interventions, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) of striatal regions like the nucleus accumbens, which has been shown to attenuate dysrhythmias in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and reduce OCD symptoms in treatment-refractory cases.^[81]^[82] In addiction, OFC dysfunction manifests as altered reward valuation, particularly in substance use disorders, where the region fails to appropriately update the relative value of drugs versus natural rewards. The lateral OFC (lOFC) exhibits hypoactivation when processing natural rewards in individuals recovering from cocaine use, leading to persistent deficits in reward devaluation and behavioral flexibility, as evidenced by impaired performance in devaluation tasks even after prolonged abstinence.^[83] Recent studies indicate that prior cocaine exposure diminishes the encoding of task-relevant and latent reward information in the OFC, contributing to suboptimal decision-making and relapse vulnerability.^[84] This pattern parallels lesion-induced impairments in value updating, underscoring the OFC's role in maintaining balanced incentive motivation.^[85] OFC impairments also underlie inhibitory control deficits in behavioral disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder. In ADHD, reduced orbitofrontal reward sensitivity correlates with heightened impulsivity and poor suppression of inappropriate responses, linked to underconnectivity in frontostriatal networks that govern "cool" executive functions like delay discounting.^[86] Similarly, in conduct disorder, OFC hypoactivity contributes to aggressive and antisocial behaviors by weakening the integration of emotional cues with inhibitory processes, as seen in dissociated prefrontal abnormalities during response inhibition tasks.^[87] Affective disorders involve distinct OFC alterations, with major depression associated with medial OFC (mOFC) volume reductions that disrupt positive affect regulation and value representation. Structural MRI studies confirm a 32% smaller mOFC volume in remitted major depression patients compared to controls, correlating with symptom severity and anhedonia.^[88] In anxiety disorders, the OFC shows exaggerated encoding of negative values, amplifying threat sensitivity and avoidance learning; for instance, social anxiety is linked to impaired OFC recruitment during social feedback processing, fostering biased negative interpretations.^[89] This hypervigilance to aversive outcomes heightens autonomic arousal and perpetuates worry cycles.^[90] Emerging theories from 2024 propose that OFC disruptions in schizophrenia impair the formation of cognitive maps—structured representations of task states and outcomes—leading to inference deficits in belief updating and causal reasoning. Functional neuroimaging reveals altered interactions between medial and lateral OFC subregions during inference-based decision-making, contributing to disorganized thinking and negative symptoms like avolition.^[91]^[92]^[93] These models suggest that OFC-mediated cognitive maps are essential for flexible inference, and their breakdown in schizophrenia exacerbates predictive processing errors across social and abstract domains.

Orbitofrontal epilepsy

Orbitofrontal epilepsy (OFE) is a rare form of focal epilepsy, comprising a small subset of frontal lobe epilepsy, which itself accounts for 20-30% of all partial epilepsies requiring surgical intervention.^[94] Comprehensive literature reviews have identified only around 31 well-documented cases, highlighting its underrecognition and low prevalence in clinical series.^[95] Recent studies from 2020-2025 emphasize its involvement in broader epileptogenic networks, including connections with the anterior insula, which contribute to recurrent seizures in otherwise refractory cases.^[96] As of 2025, a special issue in the Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology has further explored the dimensions of orbitofrontal epilepsies, including intracranial electroencephalography and surgical aspects.^[97] Seizures originating in the orbitofrontal cortex typically exhibit distinct semiological features, often beginning with autonomic or nonspecific auras such as olfactory hallucinations or viscerosensory sensations, followed by impaired awareness and automatisms.^[98] Approximately 50% of OFE seizures are sleep-related, with 56% lacking a specific aura and 62.5% manifesting as hypermotor events characterized by hyperkinetic or agitated movements.^[99] These can include oroalimentary or manual automatisms in cases propagating to temporal lobe structures, mimicking temporal lobe epilepsy semiology, or frontal-type hyperactive behaviors with gestural agitation and vocalizations.^[96] Propagation to the temporal lobe is common due to extensive limbic connections, leading to complex motor sequences like thrashing or pelvic thrusting in up to 70% of documented cases.^[94] The pathophysiology of OFE involves hyperexcitability within the agranular regions of the orbitofrontal cortex, which lacks a well-defined granular layer and exhibits cytoarchitectural vulnerabilities that predispose to aberrant neuronal firing.^[100] This hyperexcitability arises from dense inputs from sensory and limbic structures, facilitating rapid spread through networks involving the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and temporal lobe.^[96] Common underlying pathologies include focal cortical dysplasia, low-grade tumors, and gliotic scars, which disrupt normal inhibitory mechanisms and promote ictal onset.^[96] Diagnosis of OFE is challenging due to the orbitofrontal cortex's deep orbital position, which obscures scalp EEG localization and often results in nonspecific interictal discharges mimicking frontotemporal or temporal lobe epilepsy.^[99] High-resolution MRI (1-mm slices) identifies lesions in about 50% of cases, while FDG-PET reveals interictal hypometabolism in the orbitofrontal and anterior insular regions, and SPECT shows ictal hyperperfusion; however, prolonged video-EEG monitoring with intracranial electrodes like stereo-EEG is essential for precise localization in 80-90% of drug-resistant cases.^[94]^[96] Initial treatment relies on antiseizure medications such as carbamazepine, effective for nocturnal hypermotor seizures, but up to 70% of patients progress to refractory status requiring surgical evaluation.^[94] Surgical management involves tailored orbitofrontal resections guided by intraoperative electrocorticography, achieving seizure freedom (Engel class 1) in 70-71% of patients at 1-5 years follow-up, though risks include postoperative deficits in executive function or emotional regulation due to the region's role in decision-making.^[96]^[99] For non-resectable cases, alternatives like responsive neurostimulation or vagus nerve stimulation are employed, with outcomes varying based on network extent.^[94] Post-seizure psychiatric symptoms, such as transient mood alterations, may overlap briefly but are secondary to ictal disruption.

Research methods and models

Behavioral assessments

Behavioral assessments of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) function primarily evaluate decision-making processes, cognitive flexibility, impulsivity, and sensory integration through standardized tasks that probe real-world adaptive behaviors. These tools are designed to detect subtle impairments arising from OFC dysfunction, often by simulating choices under risk, reward contingencies, or sensory ambiguity, allowing clinicians to infer regional contributions without direct neural measurement.^[101] The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a widely used paradigm to assess risk-reward decision-making, where participants select cards from decks with varying long-term gains and losses to maximize net reward. Individuals with OFC lesions typically exhibit persistent selection of high-risk, short-term gain decks, failing to adapt to accumulating losses despite intact initial learning, which highlights the region's role in integrating emotional feedback with choice outcomes.^[102] This impairment is particularly evident in ventromedial OFC damage, where patients continue disadvantageous choices even after explicit feedback, contrasting with preserved performance in dorsal prefrontal tasks.^[103] Visual discrimination and reversal tasks, such as object alternation paradigms, test cognitive flexibility by requiring participants to learn and switch stimulus-reward associations, often using simple visual cues like shapes or colors. In these tasks, OFC-impaired individuals show normal initial discrimination but profound deficits in reversal phases, perseverating on outdated contingencies and requiring significantly more trials to adapt—up to threefold longer than controls in some studies.^[37] Poor reversal performance specifically implicates lateral OFC subregions in suppressing irrelevant responses and updating value representations, with errors correlating to everyday inflexibility in social or environmental shifts.^[104] Additional assessments include temporal discounting tasks, which measure impulsivity by presenting choices between smaller immediate rewards and larger delayed ones, revealing steeper discounting curves in OFC-lesioned groups indicative of heightened preference for instant gratification. For instance, medial OFC damage in humans and animals increases selection of immediate options by 20-30% over baseline, linking the region to delay tolerance and future-oriented planning.^[105] Smell identification tests, such as the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test, evaluate OFC-mediated sensory integration by assessing recognition of odors without verbal cues, where deficits signal disrupted convergence of olfactory inputs with emotional valence, often isolated to right OFC contributions in conscious perception.^[106] These assessments demonstrate high validity in detecting subregional OFC damage, with tasks like reversal learning sensitive to lateral versus medial distinctions—lateral lesions impairing flexibility more than value encoding. Recent 2025 adaptations, such as uncertainty-augmented versions of the IGT and discounting paradigms, incorporate probabilistic outcomes to better isolate OFC signals for confidence and adaptive value synthesis, enhancing diagnostic precision for partial lesions.^[107]^[108]

Animal models

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in rodents, though smaller and less differentiated than in primates, exhibits homologous functions in value-based decision-making and behavioral flexibility. Lesions to the rodent OFC, particularly in the lateral and posterior subregions, impair sensory-specific devaluation of rewards and reversal learning, where animals fail to update preferences following changes in outcome contingencies.^[109] For instance, posterior OFC lesions disrupt reversal learning and devaluation more severely than anterior lesions, highlighting subregional specialization in rodents.^[110] These findings underscore the OFC's role in integrating outcome value to guide adaptive behavior. Optogenetic manipulations have further elucidated subregional contributions in rodent OFC. Inhibiting lateral OFC neurons disrupts inhibitory control during stop-change tasks, while ventral OFC silencing alters sequential foraging decisions by modulating multiplexed reward signals.^[111] Recent studies (2025) reveal interactions between the OFC and ventral hippocampus in reward integration, where optogenetic targeting of these circuits affects prefrontal-hippocampal processing of value during decision-making.^[112] Primate models provide closer analogs to human OFC organization, enabling detailed single-unit recordings that reveal value-encoding neurons. In monkeys, OFC neurons modulate firing rates based on reward value differences between options, with causal links established through microstimulation that biases choices toward higher-value stimuli.^[113] Social tasks in primates demonstrate OFC involvement in empathy-related processes; lesions lead to deficits in social valuation and reduced communicative behaviors, as neurons encode value modulated by social context, such as rewards for others.^[114] Key experimental paradigms in animal models include probabilistic learning tasks, which probe OFC-dependent meta-reinforcement learning. In rats, OFC activity supports trial-by-trial updates in risky decision-making, with inactivation impairing adaptation to probabilistic reversals.^[115] Social defeat stress paradigms model affective processing, inducing OFC-mediated changes in prefrontal circuits that contribute to persistent avoidance behaviors and anhedonia in rodents.^[116] Despite these insights, limitations arise from species differences in OFC subregional homology; rodents lack the granular divisions prominent in primates, complicating direct translations. Comparative theories (as of 2025) address this by emphasizing functional convergence in value representation while noting divergent connectivity patterns.^[117] These models collectively inform human decision-making functions, such as flexible choice under uncertainty.

Human studies and theoretical frameworks

Human lesion studies have established a causal role for the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in computing subjective values that guide choice behavior. Patients with OFC lesions exhibit impairments in integrating reward information to make value-based decisions, such as failing to adjust preferences after devaluation of specific outcomes, demonstrating that OFC activity is necessary for translating subjective values into adaptive choices.^[118]^[119] Non-invasive stimulation techniques further support these causal links. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeted at the OFC disrupts devaluation processes, impairing the ability to update stimulus-reward associations, which underscores the region's specific involvement in value representation during decision-making. Combining tDCS with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has revealed that OFC modulation alters valuation signals, enhancing self-reported confidence in judgments while reducing metacognitive sensitivity to errors, indicating a direct influence on how values are computed and evaluated.^[120]^[121] Recent intracranial recordings in humans provide insights into real-time neural coding within the OFC. In epilepsy patients undergoing electrocorticography, OFC neurons dynamically encode value and confidence signals during decision tasks, dissociating subjective option values from uncertainty estimates in milliseconds, which supports the region's role in rapid, online computation of choice-relevant information. These findings align with brief evidence from animal models showing similar temporal dynamics in value coding.^[108]^[58] Theoretical frameworks for OFC function have shifted from viewing it primarily as an emotion center to a hub for cognitive maps that support goal-directed behavior. Early models emphasized its role in affective processing, but recent syntheses propose that the OFC maintains a flexible cognitive map of task states and outcomes, enabling predictions of rewards across contexts and generalization to novel situations. This evolution is evident in 2023-2025 frameworks highlighting the OFC's integration of state transitions and value predictions to guide adaptive actions in both social and non-social domains.^[122]^[123]^[124] A 2025 review on theory change in cognitive neurobiology illustrates this paradigm shift, arguing that computational hypotheses have reframed the OFC from a passive integrator of emotional signals to an active predictor that minimizes errors in reward forecasts, resolving inconsistencies in prior emotion-centric accounts. However, gaps persist in understanding dynamic inference processes, such as gaze-dependent attribute comparisons, where OFC neurons compute relative values between options based on visual attention rather than holistic integrations, as shown in 2025 studies. Network integration also remains underexplored, particularly the OFC-secondary motor cortex (M2) circuit, which modulates choice and outcome coding under uncertainty, with OFC selectively adapting representations to volatile reward environments while M2 remains invariant.^[122]^[125]^[39] Future directions emphasize integrating artificial intelligence models that mimic OFC-like value functions to bridge neural data with behavior. Reinforcement learning frameworks, such as meta-RL, replicate OFC's adaptation to changing reward structures, offering testable predictions for how the region generalizes values across tasks and informing interventions for disorders involving impaired valuation.^[115]^[126]

References

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Orbitofrontal Cortex and the Computation of Subjective Value
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Orbitofrontal cortex computes gaze-dependent comparisons ...
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