Abstract
The current study compared the effects of informative and confirmatory feedback on brain activation during negative feedback processing. For confirmatory feedback trials, participants were informed that they had failed the task, whereas informative feedback trials presented task relevant information along with the notification of their failure. Fourteen male undergraduates performed a series of spatial-perceptual tasks and received feedback while their brain activity was recorded. During confirmatory feedback trials, greater activations in the amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and the thalamus (including the habenular) were observed in response to incorrect responses. These results suggest that confirmatory feedback induces negative emotional reactions to failure. In contrast, informative feedback trials elicited greater activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) when participants experienced failure. Further psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis revealed a negative coupling between the DLPFC and the amygdala during informative feedback relative to confirmatory feedback trials. These findings suggest that providing task-relevant information could facilitate implicit down-regulation of negative emotions following failure.
Highlights
Feedback plays an important role in facilitating individuals’ learning and optimizing their behavior
We found feedback type significantly affected brain activation in two regions of interest (ROI), including the amygdala (p < 0.05; false discovery rate (FDR) smallvolume corrected) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) (p < 0.05; FDR wholebrain corrected)
The results revealed that negative feedback consisting of a facial expression and a verbal statement recruited different regions of the brain depending on whether the feedback was informative or confirmatory
Summary
Feedback plays an important role in facilitating individuals’ learning and optimizing their behavior. In particular, helps individuals to monitor their performance and change their strategies in order to improve subsequent performance (Kluger and DeNisi, 1996; Holroyd and Coles, 2002). Literature on negative reward prediction error suggests such error signals provide useful information regarding how to modify one’s behavior, which could encourage individuals to regulate their goal-directed behaviors (Bischoff-Grethe et al, 2009; Kim, 2013). Actively regulating negative emotions induced by negative feedback demands the use of cognitive resources as demonstrated by the recruitment of executive cognitive control neural networks associated with emotion regulation (Goldin et al, 2008; Drabant et al, 2009)
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