Microcircuitry of Performance Monitoring

Abstract

AcknowledgmentsThis work was supported by R01-MH55806, P30-EY08126, and by Robin and Richard Patton through the E. Bronson Ingram Chair in Neuroscience. We thank J. Easley M. Feurtado, M. Maddox, P. Middlebrooks, S. Motorny, J. Parker, M. Schall, C.R. Subraveti, A. Tomarken, and L. Toy for animal care and other technical assistance. We thank J. Brown, M. Cox, K. Dougherty, S. Errington, A. Maier, V. Stuphorn, A. Tomarken, and J. Westerberg for helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript.\n\nConflicts of interestNone\n\nCortical circuit mechanisms in medial frontal cortex enabling executive control are unknown. Hence, in monkeys performing a saccade countermanding task to earn larger or smaller fluid rewards, we sampled spiking and synaptic activity simultaneously across all layers of the supplementary eye field (SEF), an agranular cortical area contributing to performance monitoring in nonhuman primate and human studies. Laminar-specific synaptic currents with associated spike rate facilitation and suppression represented error production, reward gain or loss feedback, and reward delivery. The latency, polarity and magnitude of current and spike rate modulation were not predicted by the canonical cortical microcircuit. Pronounced synaptic currents in layer 2/3, which are modulated by loss magnitude, will contribute to the error-related negativity (ERN) and feedback-related negativity (FRN). These unprecedented findings reveal critical features of the cortical microcircuitry supporting performance monitoring and demonstrate that SEF can contribute to the error- and feedback-related negativity.\n\nSubject termscountermanding, stop signal task, goal selection, response inhibition, executive control, canonical cortical microcircuit, error-related negativity, reinforcement learning, reward prediction error