Electrophysiological variability during tests of executive functioning: A comparison of athletes with and without concussion and sedentary control participants.

Objective: Sport participation may benefit executive functioning (EF), but EF can also be adversely affected by concussion, which can occur during sport participation. Neural variability is an emerging proxy of brain health that indexes the brain's range of possible responses to incoming stimuli (i.e.

Neural Representations of Task Context and Temporal Order During Action Sequence Execution.

Routine action sequences can share a great deal of similarity in terms of their stimulus response mappings. As a consequence, their correct execution relies crucially on the ability to preserve contextual and temporal information. However, there are few empirical studies on the neural mechanism and the brain areas maintaining such information.

Subgoal- and Goal-related Reward Prediction Errors in Medial Prefrontal Cortex.

A longstanding view of the organization of human and animal behavior holds that behavior is hierarchically organized-in other words, directed toward achieving superordinate goals through the achievement of subordinate goals or subgoals. However, most research in neuroscience has focused on tasks without hierarchical structure. In past work, we have shown that negative reward prediction error (RPE) signals in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) can be linked not only to superordinate goals but also to subgoals.

Electrophysiological responses of medial prefrontal cortex to feedback at different levels of hierarchy.

Recent advances in computational reinforcement learning suggest that humans and animals can learn from different types of reinforcers in a hierarchically organised fashion. According to this theoretical framework, while humans learn to coordinate subroutines based on external reinforcers such as food rewards, simple actions within those subroutines are reinforced by an internal reinforcer called a pseudo-reward. Although the neural mechanisms underlying these processes are unknown, recent empirical evidence suggests that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is involved.

Human midcingulate cortex encodes distributed representations of task progress.

The function of midcingulate cortex (MCC) remains elusive despite decades of investigation and debate. Complicating matters, individual MCC neurons respond to highly diverse task-related events, and MCC activation is reported in most human neuroimaging studies employing a wide variety of task manipulations. Here we investigate this issue by applying a model-based cognitive neuroscience approach involving neural network simulations, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and representational similarity analysis.

Distributed representations of action sequences in anterior cingulate cortex: A recurrent neural network approach.

Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been the subject of intense debate over the past 2 decades, but its specific computational function remains controversial. Here we present a simple computational model of ACC that incorporates distributed representations across a network of interconnected processing units. Based on the proposal that ACC is concerned with the execution of extended, goal-directed action sequences, we trained a recurrent neural network to predict each successive step of several sequences associated with multiple tasks.