Together, our results suggest that abstinent alcoholics are able to achieve control-level behavioral performance by generating enhanced performance monitoring activity which in turn engages compensatory mechanisms that slow down reaction times and increase the likelihood of making appropriate responses in later trials. A substantial literature based on surface electrode recordings in humans (Krigolson and Holroyd 2007; Gentsch et al. 2009; Hochman et al. 2009) and intracranial recordings in primates (Niki and Watanabe 1979) provide evidence for the medial–frontal cortex as the principal neural generator of the ERN. The medial–frontal cortex is also a major node in the default mode network (Raichle et al. 2001; Greicius et al. 2003), which exhibits greater activity when at rest than when engaged in a task and is proposed to enable introspection and self-awareness (Raichle and Snyder 2007). This overlap in function of the medial–frontal cortex leads to the speculation that compromised error monitoring could be related to damping of the default mode network in its capacity as a monitor of personal activity.
