ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Behav. Neurosci.
Sec. Motivation and Reward
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2025.1634058
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring the framing effect on maladaptive behaviors: Neural mechanisms and applicationsView all articles
Self-Referencing Versus Other-Referencing in Gambling: Effects of vmPFC Stimulation on Decision-making and Feedback Processing
Provisionally accepted- 1University of Münster, Münster, Germany
- 2Universitat Osnabruck, Osnabrck, Germany
- 3Uniwersytet Jagiellonski w Krakowie, Krakw, Poland
- 4Universitatsklinikum Munster, Mnster, Germany
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A key skill useful in everyday life is learning from our past choices to overcome cognitive biases and cope with our environment. In this regard, we are often responsible not only for ourselves but also for others. As our previous results showed that after excitatory stimulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) people improved risk weighing and reduced their cognitive biases via improved affective learning, here we examined whether the above results differ when participants are playing for themselves versus for someone else. Therefore, we added this experimental manipulation to our previously well-validated gambling paradigm. We found that participants showed improved learning after excitatory stimulation when playing for themselves but not when playing for someone else. At the neural level, we observed interaction effects involving the stimulation (inhibitory vs. excitatory), the frame (gain vs. loss) and the recipient (self vs. other) in prefrontal, temporal and parietal areas during the decision-making and feedback phase. Our results suggest that excitatory vmPFC-tDCS can facilitate gambling and enhance the neural processing of gambling-related stimuli when playing for oneself.
Keywords: tDCS, vmPFC, MEG, affective learning, Gambling
Received: 23 May 2025; Accepted: 08 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kroker, Rehbein, Wyczesany, Hansen, Bianco, Espino-Paya and Junghoefer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Thomas Kroker, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
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