Error blindness and motivational significance: Shifts in networks centering on anterior insula co-vary with error awareness and pupil dilation.

This investigation aims to further our understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying the awareness of one's erroneous actions. While all errors are registered as such in the rostral cingulate zone, errors enter awareness only when the anterior insula cortex is activated. Aware but not unaware errors elicit autonomic nervous system reactivity.

Error awareness and salience processing in the oddball task: shared neural mechanisms.

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.

Corticostriatal connectivity underlies individual differences in the balance between habitual and goal-directed action control.

Why are some individuals more susceptible to the formation of inflexible habits than others? In the present study, we used diffusion tensor imaging to demonstrate that brain connectivity predicts individual differences in relative goal-directed and habitual behavioral control in humans. Specifically, vulnerability to habitual "slips of action" toward no-longer-rewarding outcomes was predicted by estimated white matter tract strength in the premotor cortex seeded from the posterior putamen (as well as by gray matter density in the posterior putamen as determined with voxel-based morphometry). In contrast, flexible goal-directed action was predicted by estimated tract strength in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex seeded from the caudate.

On the Need of Objective Vigilance Monitoring: Effects of Sleep Loss on Target Detection and Task-Negative Activity Using Combined EEG/fMRI.

Sleep loss affects attention by reducing levels of arousal and alertness. The neural mechanisms underlying the compensatory efforts of the brain to maintain attention and performance after sleep deprivation (SD) are not fully understood. Previous neuroimaging studies of SD have not been able to separate the effects of reduced arousal from the effects of SD on cerebral responses to cognitive challenges.

How the aging brain translates motivational incentive into action: the role of individual differences in striato-cortical white matter pathways.

The anticipation of reward enhances actions that lead to those rewards, but individuals differ in how effectively motivational incentives modulate their actions. Such individual differences are particularly prominent in aging. In order to account for such inter-individual variability among older adults, we approach the neurobiological mechanisms of motivated behavior from an individual differences perspective focusing on white matter pathways in the aging brain.

Functional connectivity of the striatum links motivation to action control in humans.

Motivation improves the efficiency of intentional behavior, but how this performance modulation is instantiated in the human brain remains unclear. We used a reward-cued antisaccade paradigm to investigate how motivational goals (the expectation of a reward for good performance) modulate patterns of neural activation and functional connectivity to improve preparation for antisaccade performance. Behaviorally, subjects performed better (faster and more accurate antisaccades) when they knew they would be rewarded for good performance.

Remedial effects of motivational incentive on declining cognitive control in healthy aging and Parkinson's disease.

The prospect of reward may provide a motivational incentive for optimizing goal-directed behavior. Animal work demonstrates that reward-processing networks and oculomotor-control networks in the brain are connected through the dorsal striatum, and that reward anticipation can improve oculomotor control via this nexus. Due perhaps to deterioration in dopaminergic striatal circuitry, goal-directed oculomotor control is subject to decline in healthy seniors, and even more in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD).

Conscious perception of errors and its relation to the anterior insula.

To detect erroneous action outcomes is necessary for flexible adjustments and therefore a prerequisite of adaptive, goal-directed behavior. While performance monitoring has been studied intensively over two decades and a vast amount of knowledge on its functional neuroanatomy has been gathered, much less is known about conscious error perception, often referred to as error awareness. Here, we review and discuss the conditions under which error awareness occurs, its neural correlates and underlying functional neuroanatomy.