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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on September 18, 2007
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2008 3(1):1-6; doi:10.1093/scan/nsm032
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Prefrontal cortex damage abolishes brand-cued changes in cola preference

Michael Koenigs and Daniel Tranel

Department of Neurology, Division of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Iowa College of Medicine and Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, USA

Human decision-making is remarkably susceptible to commercial advertising, yet the neurobiological basis of this phenomenon remains largely unexplored. With a series of Coke and Pepsi taste tests we show that patients with damage specifically involving ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), an area important for emotion, did not demonstrate the normal preference bias when exposed to brand information. Both comparison groups (neurologically normal adults and lesion patients with intact VMPC) preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test, but in subsequent taste tests that featured brand information (‘semi-blind’ taste tests), both comparison groups’ preferences were skewed toward Coke, illustrating the so-called ‘Pepsi paradox’. Like comparison groups, the VMPC patients preferred Pepsi in the blind taste test, but unlike comparison groups, the VMPC patients maintained their Pepsi preference in the semi-blind test. The result that VMPC damage abolishes the ‘Pepsi paradox’ suggests that the VMPC is an important part of the neural substrate for translating commercial images into brand preferences.

Keywords: ventromedial prefrontal cortex; lesion; preference; brand; taste; emotion

Correspondence should be addressed to Michael Koenigs, Building 10 Room 7-D43, 10 Center Drive MSC 1440, Bethesda, MD 20892-1440. E-mail: koenigsm{at}ninds.nih.gov.

Received March 21, 2007. Accepted August 24, 2007.


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