AUTHOR=Cohen Michael X., Van Gaal Simon , Ridderinkhof K. Richard , Lamme Victor 

TITLE=Unconscious errors enhance prefrontal-occipital oscillatory synchrony

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 3 - 2009

YEAR=2009

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/neuro.09.054.2009

DOI=10.3389/neuro.09.054.2009

ISSN=1662-5161

ABSTRACT=The medial prefrontal cortex (MFC) is critical for our ability to learn from previous mistakes. Here we provide evidence that neurophysiological oscillatory long-range synchrony is a mechanism of post-error adaptation that occurs even without conscious awareness of the error. During a visually signaled Go/No-Go task in which half of the No-Go cues were masked and thus not consciously perceived, response errors enhanced tonic (i.e., over 1-2 seconds) oscillatory synchrony between MFC and occipital cortex leading up to and during the subsequent trial. Spectral Granger causality analyses demonstrated that MFC >  occipital cortex directional synchrony was enhanced during trials following both conscious and unconscious errors, whereas transient stimulus-induced occipital >  MFC directional synchrony was independent of errors in the previous trial. Further, the strength of pre-trial MFC-occipital synchrony predicted individual differences in task performance. Together, these findings suggest that synchronous neurophysiological oscillations are a plausible mechanism of MFC-driven cognitive control that is independent of conscious awareness.