Conjoint activity of anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortex: awareness and response

By Nick Medford, Hugo D. Critchley. Brain Structure and Function, 2010

628 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is now a wealth of evidence that anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortices have a close functional relationship, such that they may be considered together as input and output regions of a functional system. This system is typically engaged across cognitive, affective, and behavioural contexts, suggesting that it is of fundamental importance for mental life. Here, we review the literature and reinforce the case that these brain regions are crucial, firstly, for the production of subjective feelings and, secondly, for co-ordinating appropriate responses to internal and external events. This model seeks to integrate higher-order cortical functions with sensory representation and autonomic control: it is argued that feeling states emerge from the raw data of sensory (including interoceptive) inputs and are integrated through representations in conscious awareness. Correspondingly, autonomic nervous system reactivity is particularly important amongst the responses that accompany conscious experiences. Potential clinical implications are also discussed.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0ea443c1cb0a2b021ad47390a343eb29f24b483

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Citations in the corpus

Sustaining attention to simple tasks: a meta-analytic review of the neural mechanisms of vigilant attention. (2013, background): “Anatomically and functionally , it is tightly connected with the anterior and middle cingulate cortex (Augustine, 1996; Eckert et al., 2009; Medford & Critchley, 2010; Taylor, Seminowicz, & Davis, 2009).”
Anterior Insular Cortex and Emotional Awareness (2013, neutral): “The International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.”
Association between heart rate variability and fluctuations in resting-state functional connectivity (2012, background): “…network (Seeley et al., 2007), and exhibits robust resting-state functional connectivity with other regions related to HRV – notably, including the insula (Critchley et al., 2003;Medford and Critchley, 2010) – and may therefore be regarded as a representative node for such a network of regions.”
Emotion regulation and emotional information processing: The moderating effect of emotional awareness (2012, background): “Dorsal ACC is recognized as crucial for the cognitive control of emotion (Medford & Critchley, 2010).”
The neural basis of empathy. (2012, methodology): “AI and ACC/MCC share a close functional relationship within various flexibly recruited and distributed networks (Craig 2009, Devinsky et al. 1995, Medford & Critchley 2010, Seeley et al. 2007, Sridharan et al. 2008, Taylor et al. 2009).”
Error awareness and the error-related negativity: evaluating the first decade of evidence (2012, background): “The insular cortex has been conjectured to reflect the activity of an “interoceptive awareness” system (Critchley et al., 2004; Craig, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience www.frontiersin.org April 2012 | Volume 6 | Article 88 | 11 2009; Medford and Critchley, 2010).”
Resting state functional connectivity in addiction: Lessons learned and a road ahead (2012, background): “In cognitive task paradigms, insula and dorsal ACC activity routinely co-occur (Lawrence et al., 2003; Medford and Critchley, 2010), likely in the service of monitoring ongoing goal-directed behavior for salient stimuli (e.g., errors, response conflict) which precipitates a cascade of neural events…”
A Convergent Functional Architecture of the Insula Emerges Across Imaging Modalities (2012, neutral): “…in concert with activation of anterior cingulate cortex, likely subserves emergent integrative functions such as conscious awareness (Craig, 2009b; Medford and Critchley, 2010), salience detection (Seeley et al., 2007), task-set maintenance (Dosenbach et al., 2007, 2008) or focal attention…”
Salience network integrity predicts default mode network function after traumatic brain injury (2012, background): “The results are broadly in line with the proposed functions for the SN, which include initiation of cognitive control (27), maintenance and implementation of task sets (9, 40), and coordination of behavioral response (41).”
The Integration of Negative Affect, Pain, and Cognitive Control in the Cingulate Cortex (2011, neutral): “For example, recent imaging data implicate MCC in the regulation of autonomic activit”
Are the neural correlates of stopping and not going identical? Quantitative meta-analysis of two response inhibition tasks (2011, background): “, 2010), and coordinating appropriate responses to internal and external events (Medford and Critchley, 2010).”
The insula and drug addiction: an interoceptive view of pleasure, urges, and decision-making (2010, methodology): “Damasio has proposed that this integration occurs in areas such as the ACC (see the reviews in this issue by Medford and Critchley (2010), as well as by Allman et al. 2010, on the functional relationships between the insula and the ACC).”