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要旨

It is debated whether the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) detects errors or response conflict
because population (EEG) measures support both accounts. One way to disambiguate conflict
and errors is to measure near mistakes which, in humans, consist of moving but stopping before
a threshold (e.g., pressing a key in response to a NoGo stimulus). Near mistake movement
magnitude correlates with conflict magnitude; thus, it is a tool for studying neuronal correlates
of conflict, which should scale with movement magnitude. Here, we demonstrate near mistakes
in head-fixed rats on a treadmill as they discriminate Go and NoGo visual orientation
gratings by remaining immobile (NoGo) or running past a distance threshold (Go). Variable
near mistake velocities allowed us to study encoding of conflict and errors at the single cell
level. We tested the hypothesis that conflict-encoding single units would scale firing rate with
conflict magnitude (i.e., near mistake running velocity), but would not respond to error feedback (noise burst).