NSF Award
2219800
How do we monitor our actions? We notice quickly when we dial a wrong number, get off the elevator at the wrong floor, blurt out something inappropriate, or send an email that we really didn’t mean to send, even when no one tells us that we made a mistake. These behaviors are everyday examples of monitoring our own performance, which is critical for us to learn from our mistakes. Although external feedback can also play an important role in monitoring our actions, remarkably, noticing that we made an error often occurs from self-monitoring alone. This research project utilizes rare opportunities to record individual human brain cells to decipher how the brain achieves this extraordinary feat. Determining how the brain enables us to detect our own errors is of broad significance because it may enable us to develop new training and teaching strategies to help those who fail to detect their own errors or, conversely, are overly sensitive to their own mistakes. Also, it will provide fundamental knowledge about the brain mechanisms underlying error-monitoring that may facilitate the development of a non-invasive biomarker that might allow us to assess the success or failure of training strategies and also enable the creation of artificial intelligence systems with better abilities at performance monitoring. The research team is involved in several outreach educational activities to under-represented groups aimed at providing enrichment classes at the middle and high school level, to teach students about exciting recent advances in cognitive neuroscience, and also bringing opportunities for STEM research experiences in neuroscience for high school and undergraduate students.<br/><br/>To understand how the brain enables us to detect our own errors, this proposal aims to test the predictions of three prominent theories of error monitoring. While these theories are at the core of a large number of studies in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, we do not know at present which (if any) of these theories actually reflects how our brain enables this critical ability of performance monitoring. Motivated by their recent discovery of single neurons which signal error in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of the human brain, the research team will examine the response of individual mPFC neurons (in patients being monitored for epilepsy prior to neurosurgery to remove epileptic brain tissue, who have volunteered to participate in this study). Participants will perform cognitive tasks to test the differing predictions of the three extant theories which may resolve which theory is correct. Along with the single neuron recordings from the mPFC, researchers will also simultaneously record scalp and intercranial EEG. These tandem recording techniques will be especially useful for understanding the neural basis of the error related negativity (ERN), which is a frequently studied scalp EEG component. Combined with novel quantitative methods, the researchers expect to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the human brain monitors errors. The researchers also plan to begin development of an accurate computational model of how the human mPFC monitors errors incorporating insights gained from the research in this proposal.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
