MSGID: 1:317/3 6274a470   
   PID: hpt/lnx 1.9.0-cur 2019-01-08   
   TID: hpt/lnx 1.9.0-cur 2019-01-08   
    How the brain says 'oops!'    
      
     Date:   
         May 5, 2022   
     Source:   
         Cedars-Sinai Medical Center   
     Summary:   
         Researchers have uncovered how signals from a group of neurons in   
         the brain's frontal lobe simultaneously give humans the flexibility   
         to learn new tasks -- and the focus to develop highly specific   
         skills.   
      
      
      
   FULL STORY   
   ==========================================================================   
   Researchers from Cedars-Sinai's Center for Neural Science and Medicine   
   and Department of Neurosurgery have uncovered how signals from a group   
   of neurons in the brain's frontal lobe simultaneously give humans   
   the flexibility to learn new tasks -- and the focus to develop highly   
   specific skills. Their research, published today in the peer-reviewed   
   journal Science, provides a fundamental understanding of performance   
   monitoring, an executive function used to manage daily life.   
      
      
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   The study's key finding is that the brain uses the same group of neurons   
   for performance feedback in many different situations -- whether a person   
   is attempting a new task for the first time or working to perfect a   
   specific skill.   
      
   "Part of the magic of the human brain is that it is so flexible,"   
   said Ueli Rutishauser, PhD, professor of Neurosurgery, Neurology,   
   and Biomedical Sciences, director of the Center for Neural Science   
   and Medicine, the Board of Governors Chair in Neurosciences and senior   
   author of the study. "We designed our study to decipher how the brain can   
   generalizeand specialize at the same time, both of which are critical for   
   helping us pursue a goal."  Performance monitoring is an internal signal,   
   a kind of self-generated feedback, that lets a person know they have   
   made a mistake. One example is the person who realizes they drove past   
   an intersection where they should have turned. Another example is the   
   person who says something in conversation and recognizes as soon as the   
   words are out of their mouth that what they just said was inappropriate.   
      
   "That 'Oh, shoot' moment, that 'Oops!' moment, is performance monitoring   
   kicking in," said Zhongzheng Fu, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the   
   Rutishauser Laboratory at Cedars-Sinai and first author of the study.   
      
   These signals help improve performance on future attempts by passing   
   information to areas of the brain that regulate emotions, memory, planning   
   and problem-solving. Performance monitoring also helps the brain adjust   
   its focus by signaling how much conflict or difficulty was encountered   
   during the task.   
      
      
      
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   "So an 'Oops!' moment might prompt someone to pay closer attention the   
   next time they chat with a friend or plan to stop at the store on the   
   way home from work," said Fu.   
      
   To see performance monitoring in action, investigators recorded the   
   activity of individual neurons in the medial frontal cortex of study   
   participants. The participants were epilepsy patients who, as part of   
   their treatment, had electrodes implanted in their brains to help locate   
   the focus of their seizures. Specifically, these patients had electrodes   
   implanted in the medial frontal cortex, a brain region known to play a   
   central role in performance monitoring.   
      
   The team asked participants to perform two commonly used cognitive tests.   
      
   In the Stroop task, which pits reading against color naming, participants   
   viewed the written name of a color, such as "red," printed in ink of   
   a different color, such as green, and were asked to name the ink color   
   rather than the written word.   
      
   "This creates conflict in the brain," Rutishauser said. "You have   
   decades of training in reading, but now your goal is to suppress that   
   habit of reading and say the color of the ink that the word is written in   
   instead."  In the other task, the Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT),   
   which involves recognizing numerals, participants saw three numerical   
   digits on screen, two the same and the other unique -- for example,   
   1-2-2. The subject's task was to press the button associated with the   
   unique number -- in this case, "1" - - resisting their tendency to press   
   "2" because that number appears twice.   
      
      
      
   ==========================================================================   
   "These two tasks serve as a strong test of how self-monitoring is engaged   
   in different scenarios involving different cognitive domains," Fu said.   
      
   A Structured Response As the subjects performed these tasks, the   
   investigators noted two different types of neurons at work. "Error"   
   neurons fired strongly after an error was made, while "conflict" neurons   
   fired in response to the difficulty of the task the subject had just   
   performed.   
      
   "When we observed the activity of neurons in this brain area, it   
   surprised us that most of them only become active after a decision or   
   an action was completed. This indicates that this brain area plays a   
   role in evaluating decisions after the fact, rather than making them."   
   There are two types of performance monitoring: domain general and domain   
   specific. Domain general performance monitoring tells us somethingwent   
   wrong and can detect errors in any type of task -- whether someone is   
   driving a car, navigating a social situation or playing Wordle for the   
   first time. This allows them to perform new tasks with little instruction,   
   something machines cannot do.   
      
   "Machines can be trained to do one thing really well," Fu said. "You   
   can build a robot to flip hamburgers, but it can't adapt those skills   
   to frying dumplings. Humans, thanks to domain general performance   
   monitoring, can."  Domain specific performance monitoring tells the   
   person who made the error whatwent wrong, detecting specific mistakes --   
   that they missed a turn, said something inappropriate or chose the wrong   
   letter in a puzzle. This is one way people perfect individual skills.   
      
   Surprisingly, neurons signaling domain general and domain specific   
   information were intermingled in the medial frontal cortex.   
      
   "We used to think there were portions of the brain dedicated to only   
   domain general performance monitoring and others to only domain specific,"   
   Rutishauser said. "Our study now shows that's not the case. We've learned   
   that the very same group of neurons can do both domain general and domain   
   specific performance monitoring. When you're listening to these neurons,   
   you can read out both types of information simultaneously."  To understand   
   how these signals are interpreted by other areas of the brain, it helps   
   to think of the neurons as musicians in an orchestra, Rutishauser said.   
      
   "If they all play at random, the listeners -- in this case the regions   
   of the brain receiving the signals -- just hear a garbled set of notes,"   
   Rutishauser said. "But if they play an arranged composition, it's possible   
   to clearly hear the various melodies and harmonies even with so many   
   instruments -- or performance monitoring neurons -- playing all at once."   
   Too much or too little of this signaling, however, can cause problems,   
   Rutishauser said.   
      
   Overactive performance monitoring can manifest as obsessive-compulsive   
   disorder, causing a person to check obsessively for errors that don't   
   exist. At the other extreme is schizophrenia, where performance monitoring   
   can be underactive to a degree that a person doesn't perceive errors or   
   the inappropriateness of their words or actions.   
      
   "We believe the mechanistic knowledge we have gained will be critical   
   to perfecting treatments for these devastating psychiatric disorders,"   
   Rutishauser said.   
      
   The research team also included Jeffrey Chung, MD, director of the   
   Cedars-Sinai Epilepsy Program; Assistant Professor of Neurology Chrystal   
   Reed, MD, PhD; Adam Mamelak, MD, professor of neurosurgery and director   
   of the Functional Neurosurgery Program; Ralph Adolphs, PhD, professor   
   of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology at the California Institute of   
   Technology; and research associate Danielle Beam.   
      
   The study was supported by BRAIN Initiative Grant number U01NS117839,   
   National Institute of Mental Health Grants number R01MH110831 and   
   P50MH094258, and National Science Foundation Grant number BCS-1554105.   
      
      
   ==========================================================================   
   Story Source: Materials provided by Cedars-Sinai_Medical_Center. Note:   
   Content may be edited for style and length.   
      
      
   ==========================================================================   
   Journal Reference:   
      1. Zhongzheng Fu, Danielle Beam, Jeffrey M. Chung, Chrystal M. Reed,   
      Adam N.   
      
         Mamelak, Ralph Adolphs, Ueli Rutishauser. The geometry of   
         domain-general performance monitoring in the human medial frontal   
         cortex. Science, 2022; 376 (6593) DOI: 10.1126/science.abm9922   
   ==========================================================================   
      
   Link to news story:   
   https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220505143721.htm   
      
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