Noemi Lee asked about this research. Eventually, she located it in "Nature"
journal. I also found this popularised summary in "Science News" to which I
subscribe.
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Brain keeps Eye on Performance
(Science News Jan 6, 2001)
Comedic-movie spy Austin Powers blurts out, "Oh, behave," to evil wrongdoers
and, "Yeah, baby," when justice and Beatles-era fashions prevail. A brain
area known to control shifts in eye gaze similarly registers an "Oh, behave"
response after errors in a visual task and a "Yeah, baby" reaction after
successes - at least in monkeys - a new study finds.
This frontal-brain region, called the supplementary eye field, lies within a
larger neural system devoted to regulating one's behavior, proposes a team
led by psychologist Jeffrey D Schall of Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Schall and his colleagues trained two monkeys to stare at a spot in the
center of a computer screen and then shift their gaze to a spot that appeared
elsewhere when the central spot vanished. On some trials, the central spot
reappeared quickly, signaling the monkeys to cancel the shift in gaze.
Electrodes implanted in the animals' supplementary eye fields identified a
group of cells that became more active only after monkeys failed to stop the
gaze shift and another that reacted solely to successful cancellations, the
scientists report in the Dec 14 ‘Nature’. A third set of neurons boosted
its activity when the monkeys received juice as a reward for correct
responses. Now, that's shagadelic.
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Dr Mel C Siff
Denver, USA
http://www.egroups.com/group/supertraining
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