Widespread temporal coding of cognitive control in the human prefrontal cortex

• Published in: Nature neuroscience 2019-11, Vol.22 (11), p.1883-1891
• Main Authors: Smith, Elliot H., Horga, Guillermo, Yates, Mark J., Mikell, Charles B., Banks, Garrett P., Pathak, Yagna J., Schevon, Catherine A., McKhann, Guy M., Hayden, Benjamin Y., Botvinick, Matthew M., Sheth, Sameer A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 631/378/2649/1409; 631/378/2649/2150; 631/378/3920; Analysis; Animal Genetics and Genomics; Animal models; Behavioral Sciences; Biological Techniques; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Cognition; Cognition - physiology; Cognitive ability; Conflict, Psychological; Control; Cortex (cingulate); Decision making; Female; Firing rate; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Gyrus Cinguli - physiology; Homology; Humans; Hypotheses; Information processing; Male; Medical imaging; Membrane Potentials - physiology; Neural coding; Neural Pathways - physiology; Neurobiology; Neurons; Neurons - physiology; Neurosciences; Neurosurgery; Prefrontal cortex; Prefrontal Cortex - physiology; Psychological aspects; Rhythms; Spikes; Temporal cortex; Temporal variations; Time Factors
• ISSN: 1097-6256; 1546-1726
• DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0494-0

When making decisions we often face the need to adjudicate between conflicting strategies or courses of action. Our ability to understand the neuronal processes underlying conflict processing is limited on the one hand by the spatiotemporal resolution of functional MRI and, on the other hand, by imperfect cross-species homologies in animal model systems. Here we examine the responses of single neurons and local field potentials in human neurosurgical patients in two prefrontal regions critical to controlled decision-making, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). While we observe typical modest conflict-related firing rate effects, we find a widespread effect of conflict on spike-phase coupling in the dACC and on driving spike-field coherence in the dlPFC. These results support the hypothesis that a cross-areal rhythmic neuronal coordination is intrinsic to cognitive control in response to conflict, and provide new evidence to support the hypothesis that conflict processing involves modulation of the dlPFC by the dACC. Using intracranial recordings in humans, the authors found decision conflict-related effects on firing rate in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), on spike-phase coupling in the dACC, and on spike-field coherence in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.