Error-likelihood prediction in the medial frontal cortex: a critical evaluation.

A recent study has proposed that posterior regions of the medial frontal cortex (pMFC) learn to predict the likelihood of errors occurring in a given task context. A key prediction of the error-likelihood (EL) hypothesis is that the pMFC should exhibit enhanced activity to cues that are predictive of high compared with low error rates. We conducted 3 experiments, 2 using functional neuroimaging and 1 using event-related potentials, to test this prediction in human volunteers.