The geometry of domain-general performance monitoring in the human medial frontal cortex
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1.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
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2.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Controlling behavior to flexibly achieve desired goals depends on the ability to monitor one's own performance. It is unknown how performance monitoring can be both flexible, to support different tasks, and specialized, to perform each task well. We recorded single neurons in the human medial frontal cortex while subjects performed two tasks that involve three types of cognitive conflict. Neurons encoding conflict probability, conflict, and error in one or both tasks were intermixed, forming a representational geometry that simultaneously allowed task specialization and generalization. Neurons encoding conflict retrospectively served to update internal estimates of conflict probability. Population representations of conflict were compositional. These findings reveal how representations of evaluative signals can be both abstract and task-specific and suggest a neuronal mechanism for estimating control demand.
Additional Information
© 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Submitted 27 October 2021; accepted 1 April 2022. We thank the members of the Adolphs and Rutishauser labs, L. J. Jin, and S. Dong for discussion. We thank all subjects and their families for their participation and the staff of the Cedars-Sinai Epilepsy Monitoring Unit for their support. This work was supported by NIMH (R01MH110831 to U.R.), the NIMH Conte Center (P50MH094258 to R.A. and U.R.), the National Science Foundation (CAREER Award BCS-1554105), the BRAIN Initiative through the NIH Office of the Director (U01NS117839), and the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Global Brain (R.A.). Author contributions: Z.F., R.A., and U.R. designed the study. Z.F. and U.R. collected and analyzed the data and implemented analysis procedures. Z.F., U.R., A.N.M., and R.A. wrote the paper. D.B. acquired and analyzed the behavioral control data. J.M.C. and C.M.R. provided patient care and facilitated experiments. A.N.M. performed surgery. The authors have no competing interests to declare. Data and materials availability: Data needed to reproduce results have been deposited at Open Science Framework (OSF) (78).Attached Files
Submitted - 2021.07.08.451594v3.full.pdf
Supplemental Material - science.abm9922_mdar_reproducibility_checklist.pdf
Supplemental Material - science.abm9922_sm.pdf
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- The geometry of domain-general performance monitoring representations in the human medial frontal cortex
- Eprint ID
- 109777
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210712-164542451
- NIH
- R01MH110831
- NIH
- P50MH094258
- NSF
- BCS-1554105
- NIH
- U01NS117839
- Simons Foundation
- Created
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2021-07-12Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-05-06Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering (BBE)