Topic: dorsal anterior cingulate cortex

Animals readily make value-based decisions between discrete and static items, with decades of work elucidating neural circuits involved in such choices (Rangel et al., 2015). Much less is known about naturalistic decision-making contexts such as goal pursuit (e.g., hunting). Dynamic choices require determining the value of blending different goal-pursuit strategies, switching goals, and continuously monitoring the actions and goals most valuable (Yoo et al., 2021). Despite its prevalence, there is a lack of methods to identify continuous decision processes and thus a dearth of understanding th

Balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial for navigating unpredictable, ever-changing environments. Exploitation stabilizes decision-making to maximize rewards while exploration introduces variability, destabilizing behavior to search for new opportunities. Previous studies have implicated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) in exploratory decision-making, but also in tracking important decision-making variables like reward. Critically, the relationship between dACC and these variables remains ambiguous because neither link has been tested causally. Here, we stimulated dACC dur

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) has been studied extensively using effort-based decision-making (EBDM) paradigms and has been shown to track effort costs. However, it remains unclear whether the dACC encodes objective measures of effort, such as energy expenditure, or subjective perceptions of effort. Further, prior EBDM research in humans has focused on artificial, seated tasks like gripping hand dynamometers, which 1) do not accurately reflect real-world effort demands and 2) are limited by fMRI's temporal resolution, making it difficult to link neural activity to behavior. To

The brain’s Extracellular Matrix (ECM) is a unique 3-dimensional macromolecular network implicated in homeostasis, neuronal plasticity, and aging-related cognitive alterations. Based on previous animal studies we hypothesized that neural ECM molecules like the proteoglycan brevican (BCAN) affect cognitive flexibility (CFL) also in humans. We addressed this hypothesis in young and older healthy human subjects by assessing flexibility performance and gray matter volumes (GMV) in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), a key structure for cognitive control, together with serum concentrations of

Recent research has focused on spatial coding of other moving agents or moving objects (Stangl et al., 2020). Oscillatory power in the medial temporal lobe of a seated observer is sensitive to the spatial location of a watched moving other individual (Stangl et al., 2020). The hippocampus also encodes predictions about when a moving target will hit a boundary on a 2D display (Polti et al., 2021). Using a 2D display and joystick, monkey dorsal anterior cingulate cortex activity predicts a moving target’s future location. (Yoo et al., 2021). However, it remains untested whether the encoding syst