Reciprocally, it could be argued that losses had less impact because patients were not playing with their own real money. It is important to note here that double dissociations between outcome valence and dopaminergic medication have been obtained with virtual money or even with points (Frank et al., selleck chemicals llc 2004; Bódi et al., 2009; Palminteri et al., 2009b). This suggests that instrumental learning performance is sensitive enough to virtual gains and losses, even if real money might elicit stronger responses in some subjects.

Another advantage of the task is that reward and punishment conditions are matched in difficulty, as the same probabilistic contingencies were to be learned. One may nonetheless argue that punishment avoidance involves an extra step, since subjects must select the other option in addition to avoid choosing the worst one. Also, in reward learning, subjects get more reinforcement as soon as they

select the correct response, whereas in punishment learning they get less reinforcement. This would support the idea that punishment avoidance is more difficult and hence more sensitive to brain damage. However, we found the reverse dissociation, meaning a selective effect on reward learning, in the exact same task with dopaminergic drugs (Pessiglione et al., 2006). Thus a difference in sensitivity is unlikely to explain the selective check details effects of AI and DS damage on punishment learning. It remains nonetheless possible that, once subjects have learned the valence of symbols, they

reframe their expectations such that neutral outcomes become punishing in the gain condition and rewarding in the loss condition. However, this should not have blurred the difference between reward and punishment conditions and therefore contributed to diminish, not induce, the asymmetry that we observed in our data. The same instrumental learning task was used in a previous fMRI study that we reanalyzed to identify candidate regions (AI and DS) for underpinning punishment-based learning and avoidance. We benefited from the rare opportunity to test damage to these ROI in hospitalized patients. Indeed, the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital contains a neurosurgery ward capable of removing glioma located around the anterior insula, which presents difficulties due to the proximity of Broca’s area (Jones et al., 2010). Also, our hospital is a national reference center for Huntington disease that participates in the international multicentric longitudinal study Track-HD (Tabrizi et al., 2009). To our knowledge, avoidance learning ability had never been investigated in patients with insular lesion (INS) nor HD. We checked that tumoral masses overlapped with functional AI in INS patients and that neural atrophy overlapped with functional DS in presymptomatic HD patients.