Neuroscientists from the cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles have unraveled the mechanism behind performance monitoring, which enables people to learn from success and failure. The researchers found how signals from a group of neurons in the frontal lobe of the brain give humans the flexibility to learn new tasks - and the focus to develop highly specific skills.
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Their findings provide a basic understanding of performance monitoring, an executive function used to manage daily life. The study, published in science on May 6, was carried out by researchers at the neuroscience and medical center and Department of neurosurgery in Cedar Sinai.
It is understood that the key finding of this study is that the brain uses the same group of neurons for performance feedback in many different situations - whether a person is trying a new activity for the first time or trying to improve a specific skill.
"Part of the magic of the human brain is that it is so flexible. We designed our research to decipher how the brain can generalize and specialize at the same time, both of which are crucial to helping us pursue a goal," said Dr. ueli rutishauser, Professor of Neurosurgery, neurology and biomedicine, director of the center for neuroscience and medicine, President of the neuroscience Council and senior author of the study
Performance monitoring is an internal signal, a self generated feedback, so that people know that they have made a mistake. One example is when a person realizes that they are driving past an intersection where they should turn. Another example is when a person says something in a conversation and realizes that what they just said is inappropriate as soon as they say it.
"The moment you say 'Oh, shoot' and the moment you say 'Oops!' are the start of performance monitoring," said Zhongzheng Fu, the first author of the study
These signals help improve the performance of future attempts by transmitting information to the brain's regions that regulate emotion, memory, planning and problem solving. Performance monitoring also helps the brain adjust its attention by indicating the degree of conflict or difficulty encountered in the task.
"So the 'ouch!' moment may prompt someone to pay more attention the next time they chat with friends or plan to stop at the store on their way home from work," Fu said.
To see performance monitoring in action, the investigators recorded the activity of individual neurons in the medial frontal cortex of study participants. Participants were patients with epilepsy. As part of the treatment, electrodes were implanted in their brains, which could help researchers locate the focus of the participants' seizures. Specifically, the electrodes of these patients were implanted into the medial frontal cortex, a brain region known to play a central role in performance monitoring.
The group asked participants to take two commonly used cognitive tests.
In the Stroop task, look is opposed to color naming. Participants saw the written name of a color, such as red, but it was printed on different colors of ink, such as green, and were then asked to say the color of the ink instead of the written text.
"This creates conflict in the brain," rutishauser said. "You have decades of reading training, but now your goal is to curb this reading habit and say the color of the ink used for the word."
In another task involving identifying numbers - Multi-source interference task (MSIT), participants see three numbers on the screen, two of which are the same and the other is unique, such as 1-2-2. The subject's task was to press a button associated with a unique number, in this case "1", because the number "2" appeared twice.
"These two tasks are a powerful test of how self-monitoring participates in different scenarios involving different cognitive areas," Fu said
Structured response
When the subjects performed these tasks, the investigators noticed that two different types of neurons were working. After making a mistake, the "wrong" neurons fired strongly, while the "conflict" neurons responded to the difficulty of the task the subject had just performed.
The researchers pointed out that when observing the activity of neurons in this brain region, they were surprised to find that most neurons become active only after a decision or action is completed. This suggests that this area of the brain plays a role in evaluating decisions afterwards, rather than making decisions.
There are two kinds of performance monitoring: general field and specific field. Performance monitoring in the general field tells people what went wrong and can detect errors in any type of task - whether someone is driving a car, navigating in a social situation or playing wordle for the first time. This enables them to complete new tasks with little guidance, which machines cannot do.
Domain specific performance monitoring tells people what's wrong and detects specific errors - they miss a turn, say something inappropriate, or choose the wrong letter in the puzzle. This is a way for people to improve their personal skills.
Surprisingly, in the medial frontal cortex, neurons that send domain general information and domain specific information signals blend with each other.
To understand how these signals are interpreted by other parts of the brain, it helps to think of these neurons as musicians in an orchestra, rutishauser said. "If they're all playing at random, the audience -- in this case, the brain region that receives the signal -- just hears a chaotic set of notes. But if they're playing a choreographed work, even with so many instruments or performance monitoring neurons playing at the same time, it's possible to clearly hear all kinds of melodies and harmonies."
However, ruishauser points out that too much or too little signaling can cause problems.
It is understood that hyperactive performance monitoring can be manifested as obsessive-compulsive disorder, resulting in a person compulsively checking for errors that do not exist. At the other extreme is schizophrenia, where performance monitoring may be so inactive that a person is unaware of errors or inappropriate words and deeds.
"We believe that the mechanical knowledge we have acquired is essential to improve the treatment of these destructive mental diseases," rutishauser said