Human Anterior Cingulate Cortex Neurons Encode Cognitive and Emotional Demands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cortical mechanisms and substrates of cognitive and emotional demands are poorly understood. Lesion studies and functional imaging implicate the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The caudal ACC (cACC) has been implicated in cognitive processes such as attention, salience, interference, and response competition, mostly on the basis of neuroimaging results. To test the hypothesis that individual cACC neurons subserve these functions, we monitored neuronal activity from single cells in the cACC while subjects were engaged in a mental arithmetic task, the cognitively demanding counting Stroop task, and/or the emotional Stroop interference task. We now report the first direct measures of single neurons in humans identifying a population of cACC neurons that respond differentially or in a graded manner to cognitively demanding high- and low-conflict Stroop tasks, including those with emotional valence. These data indicate that cACC neurons may be acting as salience detectors when faced with conflict and difficult or emotional stimuli, consistent with neuroimaging results of cACC responses to abrupt sensory, novel, task-relevant, or painful stimuli.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".