Many people unintentionally make tasks and even slight gestures, particularly when the time interval is short. Sometimes, these actions are immediately followed by a type of regret. In other cases, individuals even ask themselves if the quick decisions are the right ones.
Performance Monitoring: Natural Response of Self Assessment
According to a new study, this phenomenon is a natural neurological response called performance monitoring. During this moment, brain signals become active to assess if a person made a mistake following an action.
Performance monitoring is a type of feedback that is self-generated throughout an individual's neurons. This response is essential for the daily life of a person. The latest investigations found that the signals triggering this cognitive activity are from the brain cells located in the medial frontal cortex.
Signals from this area also fire up to help humans learn new tasks and sharpen skills that a person specializes in.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center's neurology expert and lead author of the study Ueli Rutishauser explained in a Cosmos report that this cognitive response demonstrates how flexible our minds are.
The research focused on understanding how the brain works with critical aspects for reaching goals, such as generalizing and specializing simultaneously, Rutishauser continued.
The authors observed that the signals fired during performance monitoring influence the future attempts of a person for a task. The signals activate through the neurons passing the information throughout the regions of the brain.
These signals could also assist people in discerning conflicts and difficulties along the way to completing certain tasks.
Medial Frontal Cortex in Human Brain Dedicated to Evaluate Decisions
The study utilized data from the activities of over 1,000 neurons located in the medial frontal cortex of epilepsy patients. Each participant was confirmed to have been administered with electrode brain implants as part of regulative measures against seizure attacks. The set of brain cells was monitored in each of the patients when they were tested with complex brain exercises.
The first task included a naming challenge which required the participants to tell the color of a text written with another color and vice versa. In the second task, which served as the Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT), the participants were asked to push the button of a unique number appearing with two other choices of the same digit.
Throughout the experiments, the experts say that there were two types of neurons working along with the brain processing skills. The 'error' neurons were much fired up whenever a mistake was confirmed, while the 'conflict' neurons were more active during the task was much more difficult.
In the particular brain area, the neurons would only respond when action was carried out or completed already. Neurosurgery and co-author of the study Zhongzheng Fu said that, through their team's analysis, it can be concluded that the medial frontal cortex is the brain area responsible for evaluating and influencing decisions instead of directly formulating them.
The study was published in the journal Science, titled "The geometry of domain-general performance monitoring in the human medial frontal cortex."
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