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Neural processes within the medial prefrontal cortex play a crucial role in assessing and integrating emotional and other implicit information during decision-making. Phylogenetically, it was important for the individual to assess the relevance of all kinds of environmental stimuli in order to adapt behavior in a flexible manner. Consequently, we can in principle not exclude that environmental information covertly influences the evaluation of actually decision relevant facts (“framing effect”).

To test the hypothesis that the medial prefrontal cortex is involved into a framing effect we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a binary credibility judgment task.

Twenty-one subjects were asked to judge 30 normalized news magazine headlines by forced answers as “true” or “false”. To confound the judgments by formally irrelevant framing information we presented …