Brain keeps eye on performance

Comedic-movie spy Austin Powers blurts out, “Oh, behave,” to evil wrongdoers and, “Yeah, baby,” when justice and Beatles-era fashions prevail. A brain area known to control shifts in eye gaze similarly registers an “Oh, behave” response after errors in a visual task and a “Yeah, baby” reaction after successes–at least in monkeys–a new study finds.

This frontal-brain region, called the supplementary eye field, lies within a larger neural system devoted to regulating one’s behavior, proposes a team led by psychologist Jeffrey D.