Human Anterior Cingulate Cortex Neurons Encode Cognitive and Emotional Demands

Abstract

The cortical mechanisms and substrates of cognitive and emotional demands are poorly understood. Lesion studies and functional imaging implicate the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The caudal ACC (cACC) has been implicated in cognitive processes such as attention, salience, interference, and response competition, mostly on the basis of neuroimaging results. To test the hypothesis that individual cACC neurons subserve these functions, we monitored neuronal activity from single cells in the cACC while subjects were engaged in a mental arithmetic task, the cognitively demanding counting Stroop task, and/or the emotional Stroop interference task. We now report the first direct measures of single neurons in humans identifying a population of cACC neurons that respond differentially or in a graded manner to cognitively demanding high-and low-conflict Stroop tasks, including those with emotional valence. These data indicate that cACC neurons may be acting as salience detectors when faced with conflict and difficult or emotional stimuli, consistent with neuroimaging results of cACC responses to abrupt sensory, novel, task-relevant, or painful stimuli.

Common regions of dorsal anterior cingulate and prefrontal–parietal cortices provide attentional control of distracters varying in emotionality and visibility

“…Taken together, our results do not support the suggested dichotomy within ACC for the attentional control of emotional relative to neutral interference. As such they are in line with some other recent reports indicating dACC rather than rACC activity in response to emotional distracters Davis et al, 2005;Haas et al, 2006;Mitchell et al, 2007). The study by Davis et al (2005) is particularly noteworthy as it involved single cell recording in humans in a region of ACC proximal to that implicated in the current study.…”

“…In contrast, attentional control of nonemotional distracters is thought to implicate dACC Carter et al 1995Carter et al , 2000Durston et al, 2002;MacDonald et al 2000;Menon et al, 2001). However, some studies report dACC rather than rACC activity in response to emotional distracters Davis et al, 2005;Haas et al, 2006;Mitchell et al, 2007). Moreover, work has shown that rACC shows increased responding to emotional stimuli even in contexts where attentional control is not required Kosson et al, 2006;Pissiota et al, 2003).…”

Role of the anterior cingulate and medial orbitofrontal cortex in processing drug cues in cocaine addiction

“…The "cognitive" cdACC has been previously implicated in demanding tasks that involve stimulus-response selection in the face of competing streams of information including Strooplike tasks (Bush et al, 2000), and particularly in conflict resolution (Carter et al, 1998), encompassing emotionally valenced tasks (Davis et al, 2005). The second correlation may therefore be consistent with the demanding cognitive processes that demarcate drug cues as negatively valenced for drug addicted individuals (e.g., overcoming the emotional load of drug words in order to assign what is perceived to be the subjectively appropriate or socially sanctioned negative valence).…”

Decoding Movement Intent From Human Premotor Cortex Neurons for Neural Prosthetic Applications

“…The majority of human neuronal recording studies have been carried out in temporal (Ojemann & Schoenfield-McNeill, 1999), ventral prefrontal (Kawasaki et al, 2001) and cingulate cortex (Hutchison et al, 1999;Davis, et al, 2005). The few recordings of human MI support the existence of movement-related activity in this area (Goldring & Ratcheson, 1971;Kennedy et al, 1998), but the behavioral correlates of neurons in human frontal cortex have not been examined.…”