Interactions of focal cortical lesions with error processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

Electrophysiological and hemodynamic studies have suggested that structures in the vicinity of the anterior cingulate cortex are involved in performance monitoring, particularly in detection of errors. Bidirectional interactions between the frontomedian system involved in performance monitoring and the lateral prefrontal cortex as well as the orbitofrontal cortex have been proposed, but few studies have directly addressed this issue. The authors used a speeded flankers task to investigate error-related event-related potentials in 3 patient groups with different focal cortical lesions. Whereas bilateral frontopolar lesions involving the orbitofrontal cortex as well as temporal lesions did not alter the error-related negativity (ERN), lesions of the lateral frontal cortex resulted in an abolition of the ERN and in a reduction of the error positivity. For complex, goal-directed behavior, it is important to detect when actions are erroneous and to apply appropriate remedial mechanisms. These performance-monitoring func-tions have become a major focus of research over the past decade. Cumulative evidence, particularly from event-re-lated potential (ERP) studies, gave rise to the error-detection model proposing an error-processing system made up of (a) a monitoring system that detects errors and (b) a remedia