Organization of the Cingulate Cortex

Summary

Efficient evaluation and monitoring of actions and outcomes are a key feature of primates' efficient adaptive cognition. Deficits in evaluating one's own actions and their consequences is a key feature of prominent disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD), schizophrenia, and anxiety. The Investigators know that these evaluative processes implicate medial structures of the brain that are related both to old limbic functions and to more recently evolved higher executive functions. Brain potentials related to performance monitoring have attracted a lot of interest in cognitive neuroscience but also in the clinical domain because they appear to be altered in different neurological or psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, OCD, or anxiety, and could become biomarkers of pathologies. But the neural sources of these markers are not fully determined and are currently highly debated. In addition, our work suggests that non pathological factors, such as normal morphological cortical variations, could affect those markers. Understanding performance monitoring, acting directly on medial cortex, or using electrophysiological markers in clinic are thus currently problematic and challenging. This is mostly because structure-function relationships in the medial wall are ill defined for historical, conceptual, and methodological reasons. Importantly, although individual variability of brain morphology impedes precise assessment of structure function relationships, this variability is almost never taken into account. EEG-Feedback aims to resolve these issues by evaluating the consequences of individual variability in cingulate cortex morphology on 1) surface EEG markers of feedback monitoring and 2) functional connectivity patterns thanks to resting-state fMRI.

Conditions

• Healthy

Interventions

OTHER

Train

Each subject will be trained to perform a trial-error learning task. In this task, three visual stimuli will be presented to the subject. The subject will have to find by trial-error, the one associated with positive feedback, the other stimuli being associated with negative feedback (search period). Once the stimulus is associated with positive feedback, the subject will perform a period of repetition during which he will choose the stimulus associated with positive feedback. Two variants of the task will be used: a variant in which feedback will be visual (ie positive feedback = green square, negative feedback = red square) and a variant in which feedback will be fruit juice (ie positive feedback = Fruit juice (but less than 2ml), negative feedback = no volume or small volume of fruit juice).

OTHER

MRI

Once the tasks are learned, each subject will participate in an MRI session during which an anatomical scan will be obtained. For each task, the time of presentation of the stimuli will be 2s. During this time, the subject should indicate his choice of stimulus. After a delay of 2s, feedback will be presented for 1s. Each test shall be separated by an inter-test delay of 3s. The presentation of the stimuli and the control of the answers will be managed by the E-prime or Presentation software.

OTHER

EEG

Once the tasks are learned, each subject will participate in an MRI session during which an anatomical scan will be obtained and then an EEG session during which he will perform the task learned.For each task, the time of presentation of the stimuli will be 2s. During this time, the subject should indicate his choice of stimulus. After a delay of 2s, feedback will be presented for 1s. Each test shall be separated by an inter-test delay of 3s. The presentation of the stimuli and the control of the answers will be managed by the E-prime or Presentation software.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Hospices Civils de Lyon

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Christian SCHEIBER, MD · Hospices Civils de Lyon

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

40 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2013-01-09

Primary Completion

2013-09-06

Completion

2017-07-04

Countries

• France

Study Locations