Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the primary motor cortex (M1) is a promising treatment for chronic pain, but its mechanism action remains unclear. Competing dynamic causal models effective connectivity between M1 and medial lateral pain systems suggest direct input into insular, anterior cingulate cortex, parietal operculum. This supports hypothesis that analgesia produced from most likely...

OBJECTIVE People with schizophrenia have exhibited reduced functional activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during the performance of many types of cognitive tasks and during the commission of errors. According to conflict theory, the anterior cingulate cortex is involved in the monitoring of response conflict, acting as a signal for a need for greater cognitive control. This study examined...

Reward and punishment have opposite affective value but are both processed by the cingulate cortex. However, it is unclear whether the positive and negative affective values of monetary reward and punishment are processed by separate or common subregions of the cingulate cortex. We performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study using a free-choice task and compared cingulate activation...

Inhibition, the process that overrides and reverses the execution of a thought, action, or emotion, is important in daily life. Sixteen healthy volunteers performed a parametrically modulated motor inhibition task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Two results were observed: (1) increased error-related anterior cingulate cortex activation and, (2) increased inferior frontal gyrus and...

Academic performance is in part determined by cognitive control, the skill of flexibly guiding behavior. The lateral and medial prefrontal cortex, including anterior cingulate cortex, are involved during tasks of cognitive control. Little is known about the relation between brain mechanisms underlying cognitive control and academic performance in a real-world educational environment. In the cur...

Anterior cingulate cortex has been functionally linked to the detection of outcomes that are worse than expected using both scalp electrophysiological [event-related potential (ERP)] and hemodynamic [functional MRI (fMRI)] responses. This study used a reward prediction violation design which acquired both ERP and fMRI data from the same participants in different sessions. Both the medial fronta...