Event:

Action monitoring helps you overcome your urge to order triple-chocolate ice-cream cake and instead get the fruit platter. The neural computations underlying action monitoring, and how those computations are implemented by neural circuits, are under-explored and largely speculative. We and others discovered and spent the past 8 years characterizing the EEG signature of action monitoring, which comprises theta-band oscillations (~6 Hz) in the medial prefrontal cortex. Looking broadly at this literature leads to two important questions: (1) Does midfrontal theta play a meaningful role in the neural computations underlying action monitoring? (2) What kind of neural microcircuit in the prefrontal cortex might produce midfrontal theta oscillations and associated action monitoring computations? Sadly, these questions remain unanswered, but my research group is preparing to provide at least some initial sketches of the answer. In this talk, I will provide a bird’s-eye overview of this literature, what I think are the important future directions and how we can get there, and why I think theta oscillations are the key bridge between human cognitive control and understanding its neural implementation.