General Mechanisms of Task Engagement in the Primate Frontal Cortex

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2024 Jun 5

PMID 38839745

Authors

Jan Grohn

Nima Khalighinejad

Caroline I Jahn

Alessandro Bongioanni

Urs Schuffelgen

Jerome Sallet

Matthew F S Rushworth

Nils Kolling

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Staying engaged is necessary to maintain goal-directed behaviors. Despite this, engagement exhibits continuous, intrinsic fluctuations. Even in experimental settings, animals, unlike most humans, repeatedly and spontaneously move between periods of complete task engagement and disengagement. We, therefore, looked at behavior in male macaques (macaca mulatta) in four tasks while recording fMRI signals. We identified consistent autocorrelation in task disengagement. This made it possible to build models capturing task-independent engagement. We identified task general patterns of neural activity linked to impending sudden task disengagement in mid-cingulate gyrus. By contrast, activity centered in perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC) was associated with maintenance of performance across tasks. Importantly, we carefully controlled for task-specific factors such as the reward history and other motivational effects, such as response vigor, in our analyses. Moreover, we showed pgACC activity had a causal link to task engagement: transcranial ultrasound stimulation of pgACC changed task engagement patterns.

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