Abstract
Both human and animal studies have demonstrated remarkable findings of experience-induced plasticity in the cortex. Here, we investigated whether the widely used monetary incentive delay (MID) task changes the neural processing of incentive cues that code expected monetary outcomes. We used a novel auditory version of the MID task, where participants responded to acoustic cues that coded expected monetary losses. To investigate task-induced brain plasticity, we presented incentive cues as deviants during passive oddball tasks before and after two sessions of the MID task. During the oddball task, we recorded the mismatch-related negativity (MMN) as an index of cortical plasticity. We found that two sessions of the MID task evoked a significant enhancement of MMN for incentive cues that predicted large monetary losses, specifically when monetary cue discrimination was essential for maximising monetary outcomes. The task-induced plasticity correlated with the learning-related neural activity recorded during the MID task. Thus, our results confirm that the processing of (loss)incentive auditory cues is dynamically modulated by previously learned monetary outcomes.
Highlights
Both human and animal studies have demonstrated remarkable findings of experience-induced plasticity in the cortex
We investigated the relationship of task-induced cortical plasticity and a neural learning signal emitted during the monetary incentive delay (MID) task using another event-related potential (ERP) component called feedback-related negativity (FRN)
The present study demonstrated that repeated exposure to monetary cues during the MID task results in traininginduced cortical plasticity
Summary
Both human and animal studies have demonstrated remarkable findings of experience-induced plasticity in the cortex. One can hypothesise that during the continuous MID task, participants could learn to better discriminate incentive cues associated with salient monetary outcomes due to rapid task-induced plasticity in the sensory cortex.
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