Brain mechanisms of self-control: A neurocognitive investigation of reward-based action control and error awareness

Motivation and the ability to detect errors are critical for the interaction with our environment. They provide us with the opportunity to engage in purposive, persistent and corrective behavior, and to take the consequences of our actions into account. Diminished motivation and error awareness have been linked to decreased goal directed behavior and reduced insight in certain types of brain injury and particular psychiatric syndromes. How the brain processes motivation and awareness is still largely unknown. This dissertation used behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine how cognitive control is shaped by what we expect (motivational incentive) and what we are aware of (insight in our actions). The findings emphasize, that the positive impact of motivational incentive on cognitive control appears intact with advancing age and in Parkinson’s disease. Individual differences in white matter pathways between cortex and striatum translated into individual differences in the efficacy which with older adults improved their behavior by motivational incentive. The findings on error awareness suggest that local fluctuations in brain activation during awareness are interacting globally with distant brain areas, and that these fluctuations and interactions are related to physiological arousal, indexed by pupil dilation. The value of the current approach lies in the fact that it provides a framework to embed the local activity of brain structures into larger functional systems, and that it sheds light on factors that help to improve decline in cognitive control among healthy older adults and in older adults with Parkinson’s disease.