functional neuroanatomical correlates of contingency judgment

Contingency judgement is an ability to detect relationships among events that could be related with varied frequencies such as negative, zero or positive contingencies. This process in involve in employing of attentional resources for reasoning, categorization, and decision making to control our environment. Behavioural research suggested that the allocation of attention is sensitive to frequency of contingency (blob:https://figshare.com/5096d94c-cdce-4665-aec5-91c7d763c0a2) whether it constitutes negative, zero or positive relationships however there is little known about whether the judgement of contingencies with different frequencies are distinct from each other or whether they rely on a common mechanism. The aim of the present study was to explore the functional neuroanatomical correlates of contingency judgement across three frequencies: negative, zero and positive contingencies. To address this question, we created three contingency tasks derived from the streaming paradigm, one each for negative, zero, and positive contingency frequencies. We assessed brain activity by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 20 participants while they took part in the streaming contingency learning task. For the analysis, we first determined the neural correlates of judgment of each contingency frequency by subtracting the resting baseline from each contingency tasks. We tested for shared areas in contingency tasks by calculating the conjunction across these three “Each contingency frequency – Resting baseline” contrasts. These determined shared areas included left parietal cortices (posterior cingulate gyrus (BA 23)), inferior parietal lobule and supramarginal gyrus (BA 40) as well as superior temporal gyrus (BA42). Further, the interaction analysis revealed distinct areas that mainly involve lateral prefrontal cortices (inferior frontal gyrus BA 45) in the judgment of negative contingencies compared with positive and zero contingencies. We interpret the finding as evidence that the common regions may involve in coding, integration, and updating of associative relations and diverse regions may involve in the investment of attentional resources with a varied extent in the computation of contingencies to make a judgment.