Scientists demonstrate how signals from a group of neurons in the frontal lobe of the brain simultaneously provide humans with the flexibility to learn new tasks and the attention required to achieve highly specific talents. The new study sheds light on performance monitoring, an executive function that helps people manage their daily lives.

The study’s main discovery is that the brain employs the same group of neurons for performance feedback in a variety of situations, whether a person is learning a new ability or perfecting an existing one.

Performance evaluation is a type of self-generated feedback that alerts a person when they have made a mistake. Someone who finds they drove past an intersection where they should have turned is an example. Another example is someone who says something in conversation and immediately realizes that what they just said was incorrect.

Like “That ‘Oh, shoot’ moment, that ‘Oops!’ moment, is performance monitoring kicking in,” according to the first author of the study.

These signals help improve future performance by relaying information to brain areas that control emotions, memory, planning, and problem-solving. By signaling how much conflict or difficulty was encountered during the task, performance monitoring also helps the brain change its concentration.

“So an ‘Oops!’ moment might prompt someone to pay closer attention the next time they chat with a friend or plan to stop at the store on the way home from work,” add the authors.

Investigators measured the activity of individual neurons in the medial frontal brain of study participants to investigate how performance monitoring works. The participants were epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains as part of their treatment to help determine the source of their episodes. Electrodes were placed in the medial frontal cortex of these patients, a brain region known to play a key role in performance monitoring.

Participants were invited to complete two common cognitive tests.

In the Stroop task, participants saw the written name of a color, such as “red,” printed in a different color ink, such as green, and were asked to name the ink color rather than the written word.

“This creates conflict in the brain,” according to the authors. “You have decades of training in reading, but now your goal is to suppress that habit of reading and say the color of the ink that the word is written in instead.”

In the other test, the Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT), participants saw three number digits on screen, two of which were the identical and one of which was unique — for example, 1-2-2. The subject’s job was to hit the button linked with the unique number — in this example, “1” — while resisting the urge to press “2,” which appeared twice.

“These two tasks serve as a strong test of how self-monitoring is engaged in different scenarios involving different cognitive domains,” they write.

The researchers observed two separate types of neurons at work when the subjects completed these tasks. After an error, “error” neurons activated robustly, whereas “conflict” neurons fired in reaction to the difficulty of the task the individual had just completed.

“When we observed the activity of neurons in this brain area, it surprised us that most of them only become active after a decision or an action was completed. This indicates that this brain area plays a role in evaluating decisions after the fact, rather than making them.”

Domain general and domain-specific performance monitoring are the two forms of performance monitoring. Domain general performance monitoring alerts us when something goes wrong and can discover faults in any task, including driving a car, navigating a social situation, and playing Wordle for the first time. This helps individuals to learn new activities quickly, something that machines cannot accomplish.

“Machines can be trained to do one thing really well,” they say. “You can build a robot to flip hamburgers, but it can’t adapt those skills to frying dumplings. Humans, thanks to domain general performance monitoring, can.”

Domain-specific performance monitoring informs the individual who made the error about what went wrong, detecting specific errors such as missing a turn, saying something inappropriate, or selecting the incorrect letter in a puzzle. Individual skills can be honed in this manner.

Surprisingly, neurons in the medial frontal cortex signaled both domain general and domain particular information.

“We used to think there were portions of the brain dedicated to only domain-general performance monitoring and others to only domain-specific,” but, “Our study now shows that’s not the case. We’ve learned that the very same group of neurons can do both domain general and domain specific performance monitoring. When you’re listening to these neurons, you can read out both types of information simultaneously.”

It helps to think of neurons as musicians in an orchestra to comprehend how these signals are processed by other parts of the brain, according to the authors.

“If they all play at random, the listeners — in this case the regions of the brain receiving the signals — just hear a garbled set of notes,” they add. “But if they play an arranged composition, it’s possible to clearly hear the various melodies and harmonies even with so many instruments — or performance monitoring neurons — playing all at once.”

However, too much or too little signaling might cause issues.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder can result from excessive performance monitoring, which causes a person to check for mistakes that don’t exist. At the other end of the spectrum is schizophrenia, in which performance monitoring is so underactive that a person is unable to detect faults or inappropriate words or acts.

“We believe the mechanistic knowledge we have gained will be critical to perfecting treatments for these devastating psychiatric disorders,” they conclude.

Image Credit: Getty

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