Anterior Cingulate: Single Neuronal Signals Related to Degree of Reward Expectancy

Abstract

As monkeys perform schedules containing several trials with a visual cue indicating reward proximity, their error rates decrease as the number of remaining trials decreases, suggesting that their motivation and/or reward expectancy increases as the reward approaches. About one-third of single neurons recorded in the anterior cingulate cortex of monkeys during these reward schedules had responses that progressively changed strength with reward expectancy, an effect that disappeared when the cue was random. Alterations of this progression could be the basis for the changes from normal that are reported in anterior cingulate population activity for obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug abuse, conditions characterized by disturbances in reward expectancy.

Differential Brain Activity in Alcoholics and Social Drinkers to Alcohol Cues: Relationship to Craving

“…Therefore, activation of the cingulate might be expected if subjects linked the alcohol cues with positive expectations of alcohol use. It has been reported that anterior cingulate activation may be related to the expectancy of reward and in our situation, expectancy to consume alcohol (Shidara and Richmond, 2002).…”

Learning-related changes in brain activity following errors and performance feedback in schizophrenia

“…The ERN (or, more generally, the response negativity, or RN) is a medial-frontally distributed component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) that is related to performance monitoring. It is elicited most prominently approximately 60-100 ms after subjects execute erroneous responses in choice response time tasks (Falkenstein, 1990;Gehring, Goss, Coles, Meyer, & Donchin, 1993) and appears to have its source in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; Dehaene, Posner, & Tucker, 1994;Gehrin & Willoughby, 2002;Holroyd, Dien, & Coles, 1998;Holroyd, Larsen, & Cohen, 2004), an area that is sensitive to reward and error information (Amador, Schlag-Rey, & Schlag, 2000;Shidara & Richmond, 2002) and is involved in the neuropathology of schizophrenia (Benes, Majocha, Bird, & Marotta, 1987;Benes, McSparren, Bird, SanGiovanni, & Vincent, 1991). A related ERP component, the feedback negativity (FBN), is observed when participants receive feedback about erroneous responding or poor outcomes and has also been localized to the ACC (Gehring & Willoughby, 2002;Miltner, Braun, & Coles, 1997;Ruchsow, Grothe, Spitzer, & Kiefer, 2002).…”

The cerebellum in drug craving

“…The frontal zones involved in craving seem to be the anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the inferior frontal gyrus (Grant et al, 1996;Bonson et al, 2002). The 7 anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area related to self-control (Tang et al, 2015) and to rewardrelated cognitive processes (Shidara and Richmond, 2002) has been found to be active when drug-related cues are presented (Filbey et al, 2009;Myrick et al, 2004). Activity in the anterior cingulum seems to act as a predecessor of the onset of craving, being linked to the emotional response triggered by drug-related cues (Robbins et al, 2008;Wexler et al, 2001).…”