Anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex oscillations underlie learning alterations in trait anxiety in humans

Tools

Hein, Thomas P.; Gong, Zheng; Ivanova, Marina; Fedele, Tommaso; Nikulin, Vadim and Herrojo Ruiz, Maria. 2023. Anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex oscillations underlie learning alterations in trait anxiety in humans. Communications Biology, 6, 271. ISSN 2399-3642 [Article]

Preview

Text
Hein_et_al-2023-Communications_Biology.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (2MB) | Preview

Official URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-04628-1

Abstract or Description

Anxiety has been linked to altered belief formation and uncertainty estimation, impacting learning. Identifying the neural processes underlying these changes is important for understanding brain pathology. Here, we show that oscillatory activity in the medial prefrontal, anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex (mPFC, ACC, OFC) explains anxiety-related learning alterations. In a magnetoencephalography experiment, two groups of human participants pre-screened with high and low trait anxiety (HTA, LTA: 39) performed a probabilistic reward-based learning task. HTA undermined learning through an overestimation of volatility, leading to faster belief updating, more stochastic decisions and pronounced lose-shift tendencies. On a neural level, we observed increased gamma activity in the ACC, dmPFC, and OFC during encoding of precision-weighted prediction errors in HTA, accompanied by suppressed ACC alpha/beta activity. Our findings support the association between altered learning and belief updating in anxiety and changes in gamma and alpha/beta activity in the ACC, dmPFC, and OFC.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-04628-1

Additional Information:

The study was supported by Goldsmiths University of London, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the South East Network for Social Sciences (SeNSS) through grant ES/P00072X/1. MHR, VVN and TF were partially supported by the Basic Research Programme of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russian Federation). The research used the Elekta Neuromag 306-channel MEG system at Centre for the neurocognitive research (MEG-Centre) in Moscow (Russian Federation) during 2020–2021.

Data Access Statement:

Data availability: The data that support findings of this study are available from the Open Science Framework Data Repository under the accession code wsjgk. Code availability: Code for the source reconstruction analysis (MNE Python) and convolution modelling (Matlab / SPM) has been deposited in the Open Science Framework Data Repository under the accession code wsjgk.

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates: