That mistake will cost you and your brain knows staight away!

Apr 12 2006

It happens to everyone at some time - that stupid mistake that ends up costing money.

According to a team of researchers in the U.S.a particular part of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, or rACC, becomes much more active when a person realizes he or she has made an error that carries consequences - for instance, losing money.

The team of University of Michigan researchers looked inside the human brain and captured the instant when someone makes a costly mistake and their discovery may help scientists understand mental health problems such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD.

The researchers found that when the mistake made did not carry a penalty the same area of the brain did not show the same level of activity even when a correct action carries a reward.

The rACC is believed to be involved with emotional responses, and scientists had suspected it might also be involved in response to costly errors.

This is the first brain-imaging study to test that belief.

The team had previously shown that the rACC area became much more active in response to a no-penalty error in the brains of a small group of OCD patients, compared to people without the condition.

OCD is often characterized by an untoward anxiety or fear about errors or failures in certain aspects of everyday life, with repetitive patterns of behavior to ward off or prevent such events.

The research involved 12 healthy adults who had their brains scanned using a powerful functional MRI (fMRI) imaging machine, while they were asked to respond to a series of 360 visual-based tests.

Some of the tests carried a monetary reward between 25 cents and $2, while others carried penalties of the same size, while others carried no reward or penalty.

The participants were told they had a $10 "credit" to begin, and that they would receive real cash depending on their balance at the end.

The participants had to correctly, and within a deadline of a few hundred milliseconds, press a button corresponding to one of two alphabetic letter pairs.

They were instructed to determine which letter was the odd one out in a series of other letters.

Some of the letter sequences were more confusing than others and they received immediate feedback telling them if they were wrong or too late in responding.

Stephan Taylor, M.D., an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the U-M Medical School and lead author of the new paper, says in general, the response to a mistake that cost them money was greater than the response to other mistakes, and the involvement of the rACC suggests the importance of emotions in decision and performance-monitoring processes.

He says it is very interesting that the same part of the brain that responded in an OCD study on regular, no-cost errors also responded in healthy individuals when they made the error count for more.

The new research confirms previous studies by other teams at the university using a different brain-activity monitoring technique and led by senior author William Gehring, Ph.D.

Taylor treats patients with psychiatric disorders and says the next step is to study patients using the same test as was used in healthy participants.

The researchers also hope to study the impact of cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of "talk therapy", on OCD patients' response to errors.

They are currently recruiting participants for that study.

Taylor warns the results do not have immediate implications for the treatment of OCD, but further research could lead to more tailored treatment designed for each patient.

The research team hopes to study people with depression as well.

The new research is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.