Error Awareness and Salience Processing in the Oddball Task: Shared Neural Mechanisms

Abstract

A body of work suggests similarities in the way we become aware of an error and process motivationally salient events. Yet, evidence for a shared neural mechanism has not been provided. A within subject investigation of the brain regions involved in error awareness and salience processing has not been reported. While the neural response to motivationally salient events is classically studied during target detection after longer target-to-target intervals in an oddball task and engages a widespread insula-thalamo-cortical brain network, error awareness has recently been linked to, most prominently, anterior insula cortex. Here we explore whether the anterior insula activation for error awareness is related to salience processing, by testing for activation overlap in subjects undergoing two different task settings. Using a within subjects design, we show activation overlap in six major brain areas during aware errors in an antisaccade task and during target detection after longer target-to-target intervals in an oddball task: anterior insula, anterior cingulate, supplementary motor area, thalamus, brainstem, and parietal lobe. Within subject analyses shows that the insula is engaged in both error awareness and the processing of salience, and that the anterior insula is more involved in both processes than the posterior insula. The results of a fine-grained spatial pattern overlap analysis between active clusters in the same subjects indicates that even if the anterior insula is activated for both error awareness and salience processing, the two types of processes might tend to activate non-identical neural ensembles on a finer-grained spatial level. Together, these outcomes suggest a similar functional phenomenon in the two different task settings. Error awareness and salience processing share a functional anatomy, with a tendency toward subregional dorsal and ventral specialization within the anterior insula.

Motivational Deficits in Schizophrenia and the Representation of Expected Value

“…Finally, recent work indicates that anterior insula serves as a hub in a global salience network (with the amygdalae and other structures as nodes; Harsay et al, 2012; Seeley et al, 2007), and is not thought to signal either expected value or signed prediction errors. Thus, while neural responses in anterior insula, the amygdalae, and parietal cortices are often evoked by salient stimuli with incentive value, these responses are more likely to reflect their salience than their incentive value.…”

Spatiotemporal neural dynamics of moral judgment: A high-density ERP study

“…This component has reliably been used to index cognitive control, novelty, and expectancy violation (for a review, see Folstein & Petten, 2008). The N2 is consistently localized to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (Hajcak, Moser, Yeung, & Simons, 2005), a region implicated in conflict monitoring (Botvinick, Cohen, & Carter, 2004) and saliency processing (Harsay, Spaan, Wijnen, & Ridderinkhof, 2012). Importantly, N2 also reflects the affective evaluation and motivational significance of negative outcomes (Hajcak, Moser, et al, 2005).…”

Thalamocortical functional connectivity and behavioral disruptions in neonates with prenatal cocaine exposure

“…However the thalamus, another region that is reportedly critical for this set of PCE-affected functions, has received relatively little attention. Numerous reports support a role for the thalamus and thalamocortical connectivity in 1) arousal regulation (Paus et al, 1997) that is closely related to the performance of sustained attention (Paus et al, 1997; Sarter et al, 2001), 2) saliency detection and processing (Ding et al, 2010), especially in terms of salient error monitoring (Harsay et al, 2012; Li et al, 2008; Zhang et al, 2014), and 3) working memory through the contribution from the mediodorsal nucleus (Watanabe and Funahashi, 2012). Therefore, abnormal thalamocortical connectivity could also contribute to the reported PCE-related functional deficits and deserves further attention as a novel target for better understanding of the neural correlates of PCE.…”