Theories of anterior cingulate cortex function : opportunity cost

The target article highlights the role of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in conflict monitoring, but ACC function may be better understood in terms of the hierarchical organization of behavior. This proposal suggests that the ACC selects extended goal-directed actions according to their learned costs and benefits and executes those behaviors subject to depleting resources

Executive control in the anterior cingulate cortex

Converging evidence supports the hypothesis that the prefrontal cortex is critical for executive control. One prefrontal subregion, the anterior cingulate cortex has previously been shown to be active in situations involving high conflict, presentation of salient, distracting stimuli, and error processing, i.e. situations that occur when learning new response contingencies, when previously learned response strategies fail, or when a shift in attention or responding is required. These situations all involve goal-oriented monitoring of performance in order to effectively adjust cognitive processes. Several neuropsychological disorders, for instance schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder, are correlated with morphological changes in the anterior cingulate cortex. Individuals with these disorders show impairments on tasks that require goal-oriented monitoring. The current studies used multiple behavioral paradigms to assess the effects of anterior cingulate cortex excitotoxic lesions in rats on executive control. Animals with anterior cingulate cortex lesions showed greater decline in cognitive capacity as tasks progressed, longer response latencies to conflicting stimuli, impaired reversal learning, impaired error processing, and impaired performance in the presence of previously relevant distractors. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the anterior cingulate cortex is involved in executive control, specifically monitoring impairments in performance that signal the need to adjust cognitive control

Predicting treatment response in depression: the role of anterior cingulate cortex.

Background: Identification of biomarkers predicting therapeutic outcome of antidepressant treatment is one of the most important tasks in current research because it may transform the lengthy process of finding the right treatment for a given individual with depression. In the current study, we explored the potential of pretreatment pregenual anterior cingulate cortex activity as a putative biomarker of treatment response. // Methods: Thirty-two medication-free patients with depression were treated for 6 weeks with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, escitalopram. Before treatment began, patients underwent an fMRI scan testing response to brief, masked, presentations of facial expression depicting sadness and happiness. // Results: After 6 weeks of treatment, there were 20 selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor responders and 12 nonresponders. Increased pretreatment pregenual anterior cingulate cortex activity to sad vs happy faces was observed in responders relative to nonresponders. A leave-one-out analysis suggested that activity in the anterior cingulate cortex was able to predict response status at the level of the individual participant. // Conclusions: The study supports the notion of pregenual anterior cingulate cortex as a promising predictor of antidepressant response

Functional connectivity of the anterior cingulate cortex in depression and in health

The first voxel-level resting-state functional connectivity (FC) neuroimaging analysis of depression of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) showed in 282 patients with major depressive disorder compared with 254 controls, some higher, and some lower FCs. However, in 125 unmedicated patients, primarily increases of FC were found: of the subcallosal anterior cingulate with the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, of the pregenual/supracallosal anterior cingulate with the medial orbitofrontal cortex, and of parts of the anterior cingulate with the inferior frontal gyrus, superior parietal lobule, and with early cortical visual areas. In the 157 medicated patients, these and other FCs were lower than in the unmedicated group. Parcellation was performed based on the FC of individual ACC voxels in healthy controls. A pregenual subdivision had high FC with medial orbitofrontal cortex areas, and a supracallosal subdivision had high FC with lateral orbitofrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus. The high FC in depression between the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the subcallosal parts of the ACC provides a mechanism for more non-reward information transmission to the ACC, contributing to depression. The high FC between the medial orbitofrontal cortex and supracallosal ACC in depression may also contribute to depressive symptoms

Reward-based contextual learning supported by anterior cingulate cortex

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is commonly associated with cognitive control and decision making, but its specific function is highly debated. To explore a recent theory that the ACC learns the reward values of task contexts (Holroyd & McClure in Psychological Review, 122, 54-83, 2015; Holroyd & Yeung in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 122-128, 2012), we recorded the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from participants as they played a novel gambling task. The participants were first required to select from among three games in one "virtual casino," and subsequently they were required to select from among three different games in a different virtual casino; unbeknownst to them, the payoffs for the games were higher in one casino than in the other. Analysis of the reward positivity, an ERP component believed to reflect reward-related signals carried to the ACC by the midbrain dopamine system, revealed that the ACC is sensitive to differences in the reward values associated with both the casinos and the games inside the casinos, indicating that participants learned the values of the contexts in which rewards were delivered. These results highlight the importance of the ACC in learning the reward values of task contexts in order to guide action selection

A functional dissociation of conflict processing within anterior cingulate cortex

Goal-directed behavior requires cognitive control to regulate neural processing when conflict is encountered. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) has been associated with detecting response conflict during conflict tasks. However, recent findings have indicated not only that two distinct subregions of dACC are involved in conflict processing but also that the conflict occurs at both perceptual and response levels. We clarified a functional dissociation of the caudal dACC (cdACC) and the rostral dACC (rdACC) in responding to different sources of conflict. The cdACC was selectively engaged in perceptual conflict whereas the rdACC was more active in response conflict. Further, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was coactivated not with cdACC but with rdACC. We suggest that cdACC plays an important role in regulative processing of perceptual conflict whereas rdACC is involved in detecting response conflict

A novel neural prediction error found in anterior cingulate cortex ensembles

The function of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) remains controversial, yet many theories suggest a role in behavioral adaptation, partly because a robust event-related potential, the feedback-related negativity (FN), is evoked over the ACC whenever expectations are violated. We recorded from the ACC as rats performed a task identical to one that reliably evokes an FN in humans. A subset of neurons was found that encoded expected outcomes as abstract outcome representations. The degree to which a reward/non-reward outcome representation emerged during a trial depended on the history of outcomes that preceded it. A prediction error was generated on incongruent trials as the ensembles shifted from representing the expected to the actual outcome, at the same time point we have previously reported an FN in the local field potential. The results describe a novel mode of prediction error signaling by ACC neurons that is associated with the generation of an FN