Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, United States.
Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, United States.
Cereb Cortex. 2024 Aug 1;34(8). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhae332.
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been implicated across multiple highly specialized cognitive functions-including task engagement, motivation, error detection, attention allocation, value processing, and action selection. Here, we ask if ACC lesions disrupt task performance and firing in dorsomedial striatum (DMS) during the performance of a reward-guided decision-making task that engages many of these cognitive functions. We found that ACC lesions impacted several facets of task performance-including decreasing the initiation and completion of trials, slowing reaction times, and resulting in suboptimal and inaccurate action selection. Reductions in movement times towards the end of behavioral sessions further suggested attenuations in motivation, which paralleled reductions in directional action selection signals in the DMS that were observed later in recording sessions. Surprisingly, however, beyond altered action signals late in sessions-neural correlates in the DMS were largely unaffected, even though behavior was disrupted at multiple levels. We conclude that ACC lesions result in overall deficits in task engagement that impact multiple facets of task performance during our reward-guided decision-making task, which-beyond impacting motivated action signals-arise from dysregulated attentional signals in the ACC and are mediated via downstream targets other than DMS.
前扣带皮层（ACC）与多种高度专业化的认知功能有关，包括任务参与、动机、错误检测、注意力分配、价值处理和动作选择。在这里，我们想知道，在执行一项涉及许多这些认知功能的奖励导向决策任务时，ACC 损伤是否会破坏背内侧纹状体（DMS）中的任务表现和放电。我们发现，ACC 损伤影响了任务表现的几个方面，包括减少试验的开始和完成，减缓反应时间，并导致次优和不准确的动作选择。行为会议结束时运动时间的减少进一步表明动机减弱，这与在记录会议后期观察到的 DMS 中定向动作选择信号的减少相平行。然而，令人惊讶的是，除了会议后期的动作信号改变之外，DMS 中的神经相关性在很大程度上不受影响，即使行为在多个层面上受到干扰。我们得出结论，ACC 损伤导致任务参与的整体缺陷，影响我们的奖励导向决策任务中任务表现的多个方面，除了影响动机动作信号之外，这些缺陷还源于 ACC 中调节不良的注意力信号，并通过 DMS 以外的下游靶点来介导。
