Event ANT Neuromeeting 2025 - Berlin starts on Jan 16, 2025, 9:00:00 AM (Europe/Berlin)
Performance monitoring, post-error adjustments, and acetylcholine
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Location: Festsaal - (30 minutes)
Performance monitoring, post-error adjustments, and acetylcholine
Prof. Dr. med. habil. Markus Ullsperger
Professor for Neuropsychology, Head of Department at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg
Professor for Neuropsychology, Head of Department at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg

Professor Markus Ullsperger heads the Department of Neuropsychology at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. His research focuses on developing and testing neurobiologically plausible models of performance monitoring and adaptive goal-directed behavior in humans. He pursues a convergent-methods approach combining neuroimaging and EEG with computational modeling and pharmacological challenges in healthy participants and patients with neurological or psychiatric disorders.

Trained as a physician, Markus Ullsperger obtained his doctoral degree at the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, Germany, in 2000. Thereafter he worked as a scientific staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig at the Department of Cognitive Neurology. After his habilitation, he moved to Cologne, where he headed the Max Planck Research Group ‘Cognitive Neurology’ at the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research. In 2009, he was appointed as full professor of Biological Psychology at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, and principal investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour. Since 2012, he has been full professor of Neuropsychology at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. In 2021/22 he was President of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR).

Performance monitoring is essential for successful goal-directed behavior. In the last three decades research has made great progress in advancing our understanding of the neural mechanisms of performance monitoring and subsequent recruitment of cognitive control in the service of adapting and optimizing behavior. After a brief introduction of the neural correlates of performance monitoring that are typically observed using EEG and fMRI in humans, I will focus on post-error adjustments. It has been hypothesized that acetylcholine (ACh) signaling from the basal forebrain to sensory cortices and medial temporal lobes mediates post-error adaptations, in particular increases of selective attention and updates in memory. I will present a set of fMRI and EEG experiments addressing the mechanisms of these adjustments. In double-blind, placebo-controlled pharmacological challenge studies using the muscarinic antagonist biperiden we found that blocking M1 receptors impairs post-error adjustments and memory performance. The data suggests that ACh plays an important role in the interaction of the performance monitoring system and the visual cortices where it helps to enhance task-relevant stimulus representations and to suppress task-irrelevant distractor representations.