An adequate performance requires the ability to monitor ongoing behavior, detect errors and modify the performance in response to changing environmental conditions. In the context of actionmonitoring, a seminal finding for the neuroscientific community was a negative event-related brain potential, termed error-related negativity (ERN), which peaks 80 ms after a wrong response and is localized in the anterior cingulate cortex. The ERN has been proposed to reflect conflict monitoring or error detection. The reinforcement learning theory has provided an account of the ERN based on phasic dopaminergic activity induced by the basal ganglia (BG). However, despite previous studies showing altered error processing in BG disorders, only few investigations have demonstrated a direct role of the BG (Ncl Accumbens) in the generation of the ERN. Accordingly, we plan to record local field potential activity from the human BG—the STN and the internal globus pallidus (GPi)—in patients undergoing deep brain stimulation during performance of a reaction-time conflict task and an overlearned motor task. Our aims are to investigate the role of these BG structures in conflict processing and feedforward error detection. Our investigations will shed new light on the mechanisms of performance monitoring and motor control. Moreover, a deeper knowledge of BG functioning during action-monitoring will contribute to our understanding of the neural disorders of movement as well.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
