Professor Ian Robertson, Trinity College Dublin, will be giving a special seminar entitled:

Error, Arousal and Awareness

Abstract

In this talk, I will review the results from a series of studies we have recently published dealing with the interrelationships between error processing, arousal and awareness deficits in normal participant and in a number of clinical groups including ADHD, autism, tau-opathies and traumatic brain injury. I will show that two well known error-related ERP components, the Error Related Negativity (ERN) and Error Positivity (Pe) have a differential relationship with awareness: While the ERN was unaffected by the participants’ conscious experience of errors, the Pe was only seen when participants were aware of committing an error. Source localisation of these components indicated that the ERN was generated by a caudal region of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) while the Pe was associated with contributions from a more rostral ACC region and the posterior cingulate/precuneus. Tonic EEG measures of cortical arousal were correlated with individual rates of error awareness and showed a specific relationship with the amplitude of the Pe. The latter finding is consistent with evidence that the Pe represents a P3-like facilitation of information processing modulated by subcortical arousal systems. Our data suggests that the ACC might participate in both preconscious and conscious error detection and that cortical arousal provides a necessary setting condition for error awareness. I go on to show deficits in different aspects of this system in different clinical groups and also show how errors can be reduced experimentally by optimizing arousal through a self-alerting procedure. Finally, I show genetic linkages of specific aspects of attention and arousal.

References

O’Keeffe F, Murray B, Coen RF, Dockree P, Bellgrove M Garavan H, Lynch T, Robertson IH (in press) Loss of Insight in Frontotemporal Dementia, Corticobasal Degeneration and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. Brain.

O’Connell,R.G., Dockree,P.M., Bellgrove, M.A., Kelly,S.P., Hester,R., Garavan,H, Robertson,I.H. & Foxe,J.J. (in press) The role of Cingulate Cortex in the detection of errors with and without awareness: A High-density electrical mapping study. European Journal of Neuroscience.

Dockree P, Kelly SP, Foxe JF, Reilly RB and Robertson IH (in press) Optimal sustained attention is linked to the spectral content of background EEG activity: Greater ongoing tonic alpha (~10Hz) power supports successful phasic goal activation. European Journal of Neuroscience.

Magno E, Foxe JJ, Molholm S, Robertson IH, Garavan H (2006) The anterior cingulate and error avoidance. Journal of Neuroscience 26, 4769-4773.

Johnson KA, Kelly SP, Bellgrove MA, Barry E, Cox M, Gill M, Robertson IH (2007) Response variability in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Evidence for neuropsychological heterogeneity. Neuropsychologia 45, 630-638.

Bellgrove, M.A., Mattingley, J.B., Hawi, Z., Mullins, C., Kirley, A., Gill, M. & Robertson, I.H (in press). Impaired temporal resolution of visual attention and DBH genotype in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Biological Psychiatry

Dockree PM, X O’Keeffe FM, Moloney, P, Carton, S, Jacoby, LL and Robertson IH (2006) Capture by misleading information and its false acceptance in patients with traumatic brain injury. Brain 129: 128-140.

Dockree PM, Kelly, SM, Robertson IH, Reilly R, Foxe, J (2005) Neurophysiological Markers Of Alert Responding During Goal-Directed Behaviour: A High Density Electrical Mapping Study. Neuroimage 27: 587-601.

Bellgrove MA, Hawi Z,, Lowe N, Kirley, A, Robertson IH, Gill M (2005) DRD4 gene variants and response inhibition in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Effects of associated alleles at the VNTR and °©521 SNP. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric 136B. 81-86