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Crosslinking EEG time–frequency decomposition and fMRI in error monitoring

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Abstract

Recent studies implicate a common response monitoring system, being active during erroneous and correct responses. Converging evidence from time–frequency decompositions of the response-related ERP revealed that evoked theta activity at fronto-central electrode positions differentiates correct from erroneous responses in simple tasks, but also in more complex tasks. However, up to now it is unclear how different electrophysiological parameters of error processing, especially at the level of neural oscillations are related, or predictive for BOLD signal changes reflecting error processing at a functional-neuroanatomical level. The present study aims to provide crosslinks between time domain information, time–frequency information, MRI BOLD signal and behavioral parameters in a task examining error monitoring due to mistakes in a mental rotation task. The results show that BOLD signal changes reflecting error processing on a functional-neuroanatomical level are best predicted by evoked oscillations in the theta frequency band. Although the fMRI results in this study account for an involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and the Insula in error processing, the correlation of evoked oscillations and BOLD signal was restricted to a coupling of evoked theta and anterior cingulate cortex BOLD activity. The current results indicate that although there is a distributed functional-neuroanatomical network mediating error processing, only distinct parts of this network seem to modulate electrophysiological properties of error monitoring.

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Notes

  1. Here, all extracted frequency bands from the sLORETA analysis were tested separately. Note that as described in the “Methods” section that bootstrap tests were conducted. These bootstrapped the whole data matrix, thus Type I errors can be controlled.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); BE 4045/6-2 and BE 4045/10-1 to C·B. and WA 987/14-1 to E.W.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Ardeystr. 64, 44139, Dortmund, Germany

    Sven Hoffmann & Edmund Wascher

  2. Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, Biopsychology, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Franziska Labrenz, Maria Themann & Christian Beste

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  1. Sven Hoffmann
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  2. Franziska Labrenz
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  3. Maria Themann
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  4. Edmund Wascher
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Correspondence to Sven Hoffmann.

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S. Hoffmann and C. Beste contributed equally to the manuscript.

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Hoffmann, S., Labrenz, F., Themann, M. et al. Crosslinking EEG time–frequency decomposition and fMRI in error monitoring. Brain Struct Funct 219, 595–605 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-013-0521-y

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