Center for the Study of Brain, Mind & Behavior A Computational Simulation of Electrophysiological Markers of Anterior Cingulate Function in a Go/NoGo task

We have recently presented empirical evidence for the view that the NoGo-N2, an event-related brain potential (ERP) component observed in Go/NoGo tasks, reflects conflict arising from competition between the execution and inhibition of a single response (Nieuwenhuis, Yeung, Van den Wildenberg, & Ridderinkhof, in press). Furthermore, the source of the NoGo-N2 was localized to anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain region thought to be involved in response conflict detection. Here we show that a recently proposed model of behavioral performance and ACC functioning in the Go/NoGo task can account for many aspects of the empirical data reported in Nieuwenhuis et al. We also discuss the aspects of the data that the model could not capture