Anticipation causes increased blood flow to the anterior cingulate cortex

Abstract

Increased cerebral blood flow in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been noted in a range of cognitively demanding tasks studied with PET. A PET study of 10 normal males was carried out using the bolus H2150 intravenous injection technique to examine the effects of anticipation on blood flow to the ACC. In a series of conditions, subjects 1) passively viewed flashing plus signs, 2) noted the occurrence of abstract patterns, 3) named animal pictures, 4) or carried out a semantic judgement on animal pictures. Anticipatory scans were carried out after the subjects were presented with the instructions but before they began the cognitive task, as they were passively viewing plus signs. Sigruficantly increased cerebral blood flow to the ACC was found in all three cognitive tasks when compared with baseline. More importantly, a similar increase was observed in each of the anticipatory states when compared with baseline. When the anticipation scan served as the,subtracted baseline for the cognitive task, the increase in blood flow was not sigruficant. This pattern of activity suggests that receiving instructions, preparation, and anticipation of the cognitive task, rather than task-related processing itself, may be responsible for the increased blood flow in the ACC noted in many PET studies of simple cognitive tasks.

Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex: A role in reward-based decision making

“…Monkey single-unit data (24) and human fMRI data (19) clearly indicate that dACC responds well in advance of stimuli-a fact other theories cannot adequately incorporate. Also, the fact that monkey single-unit studies (24)(25)(26)(27) repeatedly show responses by different cells at different times (prestimulus, preresponse, peri-response, postresponse) presents a puzzle for alternative, unimodal theories.…”

“…Similarly, although competition monitoring and task difficulty cannot explain all of the data, they are factors that would be predicted to yield increased dACC activity, because diverse dACC cell types would be recruited by cognitively difficult tasks such as those requiring the resolution of competition. Thus, in addition to readily explaining activity during many reward-based decision making and other complex response selection tasks (such as the Stroop, Stroop-like, Eriksen Flanker, divided attention, go-nogo, and verb generation tasks) (1), the heterogeneity concept has the unique capacity to explain anticipatory (prestimulus) activity (1,19), error feedback activity (16), and reward-and-punishment activity (22)-observations that existing theories have difficulty accounting for (1).…”

“…Convergent data (6,7) has established that dACC specifically subserves cognition (8) and motor control (9), but the mechanisms by which this region operates have not been elucidated. Based primarily on work in humans, different functions have been ascribed to this area, including attention-for-action͞target selection (10,11), motivational valence assignment (12), motor response selection (13)(14)(15), error detection͞performance monitoring (16,17), competition monitoring (18), anticipation (19), working memory (20), novelty detection (21), and reward assessment (22), but no single unifying model explains the diverse results from neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies (1). In addition to the intrinsic importance of providing new information about normal cognition and motor control, determining how dACC works is essential because abnormalities of different ACC subdivisions have been implicated in the pathophysiology of many neuropsychiatric disorders (23).…”

Dissociation in the neural basis underlying Chinese tone and vowel production

“…There is no reason that tonechange condition needs more attention than vowel-change condition. An alternative explanation is that the activation of anterior cingulate gyrus may be attributed to the participants' preparation, planning, and anticipation of the cognitive task rather than taskrelated processing itself (Murtha et al, 1996). Further evidence is needed to support this point of view.…”

Neural Responses to BEGIN- and END-Stimuli of the Smoking Ritual in Nonsmokers, Nondeprived Smokers, and Deprived Smokers

“…Like the ventral striatum, the ACC is involved in reward processing and it also seems to be sensitive to the magnitude of a received reward (Bush et al, 2002;Peoples, 2002;Shidara and Richmond, 2002;Kirsch et al, 2003). It has also been shown to have a role in anticipation (Murtha et al, 1996). In conditioning studies, the ACC was found to discriminate between a reinforced CS (CS + ) and a nonreinforced CS (CS-) (Martin-Soelch et al, 2007).…”