Bilateral cingulotomy
Neuroimaging also uncovered different sub-regions in the anterior cingulate cortex itself based on their function. These studies showed that the caudal part of the anterior cingulate cortex plays a more important function in cognitive activities that involve attention, salience, interference and response competition. These results combined with electrophysiological investigation of the function of neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex have provided insights that can be used in the improvement of cingulotomy performed on patients treated for OCD. The basis behind this idea is the fact that a variation of certain tasks, Emotional Stroop tasks (ES), which have been particularly identified as exerting effects in OCD patients activate neurons in the more rostral part of the anterior cingulate cortex. Thus, theoretically if bilateral cingulotomy is performed in such patient in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, better results should be obtained.
Anterior cingulate cortex
A typical task that activates the ACC involves eliciting some form of conflict within the participant that can potentially result in an error. One such task is called the Eriksen flanker task and consists of an arrow pointing to the left or right, which is flanked by two distractor arrows creating either compatible (««Stroop task, which involves naming the color ink of words that are either congruent ( written in red) or incongruent ( written in blue). Conflict occurs because people’s reading abilities interfere with their attempt to correctly name the word’s ink color. A variation of this task is the "Counting-Stroop", during which people count either neutral stimuli (‘dog’ presented four times) or interfering stimuli (‘three’ presented four times) by pressing a button. Another version of the "Stroop task" named the "Emotional Counting Stroop" is identical to the "Counting Stroop" test, except that it also uses segmented or repeated emotional words such as "murder" during the interference part of the task.