Anterior cingulate cortex
It appears to play a role in a wide variety of autonomic functions, such as regulating blood pressure and heart rate.
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.