Neuronal Activity in Primate Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex Signals Task Conflict and Predicts Adjustments in Pupil-Linked Arousal

Abstract

Summary Whether driving a car, shopping for food, or paying attention in a classroom of boisterous teenagers, it’s often hard to maintain focus on goals in the face of distraction. Brain imaging studies in humans implicate the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) in regulating the conflict between goals and distractors. Here we show for the first time that single dACC neurons signal conflict between task goals and distractors in the rhesus macaque, particularly for biologically-relevant social stimuli. For some neurons, task conflict signals predicted subsequent changes in pupil size—a peripheral index of arousal linked to noradrenergic tone—associated with reduced distractor interference. dACC neurons also responded to errors and these signals predicted adjustments in pupil size. These findings provide the first neurophysiological endorsement of the hypothesis that dACC regulates conflict, in part, via modulation of pupil-linked processes such as arousal.

Faces are special, but facial expressions aren’t: Insights from an oculomotor capture paradigm

“…One possibility is that outcome may depend on spontaneous fluctuations in attentional preparation linked to tonic activity in the locus coeruleus, as suggested by recent pupillometry studies in macaques (Ebitz, Pearson, & Platt, 2014;Ebitz & Platt, 2015) and in humans (Braem, Coenen, Bombeke, van Bochove, & Notebaert, 2015;Gilzenrat, Nieuwenhuis, Jepma, & Cohen, 2010).…”

Neural correlates of pupil dilation during human fear learning

“…Spontaneous pupil dilations during rest have already been linked to ACC activity in the macaque monkey (Aston-Jones & Cohen, 2005;Ebitz & Platt, 2015;Joshi et al, 2016) and also to activity in dACC in humans (Murphy et al, 2014;Schneider et al, 2016). Moreover, other autonomous responses to fear stimuli have previously been related to dACC activity: the difference in SCR to CS+ and CS-in fear conditioning (Milad et al, 2007), as well as the magnitude of SCR in the anticipation of pain (Seifert et al, 2013) were found to positively correlate with dACC activity.…”

Using pupil size and heart rate to infer affective states during behavioral neurophysiology and neuropsychology experiments

“…The interpretation of autonomic outputs, however, remains controversial (2). Inferred internal states and associated behavioral consequences vary among studies and have included veracity (2, 3), valence (4), reward (5, 6), surprise (7), attention (8), vigilance (9), arousal (10, 11), anxiety (12, 13), impulse control and emotional clarity (14), and cognitive performance (15–18). Some of these states have been grouped into the regulation and expression of emotion (19–21).…”