ACC causally supports learning -difficult- attention sets

We used focused ultrasound (FUS) sonication of the anterior cingualte and striatum to disrupt local processing during learning. FUS in ACC slowed down learning of atetntion sets – but only when the attentional demands were high and the task included the risk of loosing already attaiuned reward tokens. Under these cognitive and motivaitonally challenging conditions FUS reduce the ability to adapt and update attentional sets. See our paper Banaie Boroujeni et al. (2022) The anterior cingulate cortex causally supports flexible learning under motivationally challenging and cognitively demanding conditions. PLoS Biology. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.04.455080.

Related News

Large-scale support awarded for advanced Neuro-Behavioral Monitoring

Thilo Womelsdorf, Kari Hoffman and eight more members of a large-scale initiative received a large-scale infrastructure support grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, amounting to $3.1M federal support. This extraordinary award allows establishing – in Toronto- an advanced neuroscience infrastructure for conducting research of brain activity and behavior close to real world settings. For a press release see […]

Interneuron-specific gamma synchrony indexes uncertainty resolution

Our new paper in eLife shows that a subclass of fast spiking interneurons in prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex gamma synchronizes when uncertainty about cues and outcomes is resolved. This finding was possible by classifying narrow spiking neurons into fast and non-fast spiking classes and correlating their firing and spike-LFP synchrony during processing of attention […]

3 minute Thesis Competition

Congratulations to Ben to win the York University 3 minute thesis competition in presenting his MSc graduation work ! Here is the University’s press release about the 2016 YorkU 3MT Winner ! Good luck from the laboratory when moving to the provincial level competition (still with only 3 minutes…for the whole thesis).