VmPFC supports persistence during goal pursuit through selective attention

Abstract

Striking the balance between persistence with a goal and flexibility in the face of better options is critical for effectively organizing behaviour across time. While people are often biased towards completing their current goal (e.g. sunk cost biases), it is unclear how these biases occur at a mechanistic level, still allowing for some flexibility for goal abandonment. We propose that ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays a critical role in orienting attention towards a current goal, prioritising goal completion but allowing for abandonment, particularly when the current goal fails. We developed a novel incremental goal pursuit task to study goal-directed attention and action in healthy individuals with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and in an independent group of individuals with brain lesions. The task required participants to make sequential decisions between continuing to persist with a current goal (commitment), versus abandoning progress for a better alternative goal (flexibility). We show that individuals who persist more show greater goal-oriented attention outside the decision period. Increasing attentional capture by the current goal is also revealed in decision-making: people remain more likely to abandon from frustration (collapse of value of the current goal) than from temptation (attraction from valuable alternative goals). Strikingly, we find that our stable inter-individual metrics of persistence and goal-oriented attention were both predicted by baseline activity in vmPFC, tracking goal progress. We present converging evidence from an independent lesion patient study demonstrating the causal involvement of vmPFC in goal persistence: damage to the vmPFC reduces biases to over-persist with the current goal, leading to a performance benefit in our task.