Although numerous lesion or ACC manipulation studies have linked ACC function with decision-making and outcome evaluation particularly within the context of foraging behavior (4, 20, 21, 26–29), few have supported its role in conflict monitoring (26–30) despite the historical attribution of ACC to this function (2, 22, 31, 32). In particular, decision-making studies using ACC lesions or disruptions have often yielded a surprisingly high number of negative results (26–30), making our results potentially surprising. We think that there are a variety of reasons that may account for this apparent discrepancy. First, many animal-based tasks rely on oculomotor movements, which are relatively ballistic, and offer fewer degrees of freedom when compared to the whole-body movements required for our task. Similarly, many variants of the stop-signal task require subjects to simply refrain from completing an action, rather than actually change the direction or outcome of an action after having already initiated an errant response.
