Errors recruit both cognitive and emotional monitoring systems: Simultaneous intracranial recordings in the dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus and amygdala combined with fMRI
There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
We studied error monitoring in a human patient with unique implantation of depth electrodes
in both the left dorsal cingulate gyrus and medial temporal lobe prior to surgery.
The patient performed a speeded go/nogo task and made a substantial number of commission
errors (false alarms). As predicted, intracranial Local Field Potentials (iLFPs) in
dorsal anterior cingulate indexed the detection of errors, showing an early differential
activity around motor execution for false alarms, relative to correct responses (either
hits or correct inhibitions). More surprisingly, we found that the left amygdala also
participated to error monitoring (although no emotional stimuli were used), but with
a very different neurophysiological profile as compared with the dorsal cingulate
cortex. Amygdala iLFPs showed a precise and reproducible temporal unfolding, characterized
by an early monophasic response for correct hits around motor execution, which was
delayed by approximately 300ms for errors (even though actual RTs were almost identical
in these two conditions). Moreover, time-frequency analyses demonstrated a reliable
and transient coupling in the theta band around motor execution between these two
distant regions. Additional fMRI investigation in the same patient confirmed a differential
involvement of the dorsal cingulate cortex vs. amygdala in error monitoring during
this go/nogo task. Finally, these intracranial results for the left amygdala were
replicated in a second patient with intracranial electrodes in the right amygdala.
Altogether, these results suggest that the amygdala may register the motivational
significance of motor actions on a trial-by-trial basis, while the dorsal anterior
cingulate cortex may provide signals concerning failures of cognitive control and
behavioral adjustment. More generally, these data shed new light on neural mechanisms
underlying self-monitoring by showing that even "simple" motor actions recruit not
only executive cognitive processes (in dorsal cingulate) but also affective processes
(in amygdala).
Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.