Abstract
Performance-related feedback plays an important role in improving human being’s adaptive behavior. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), previous studies have associated a particular component, i.e., reward positivity (RewP), with outcome evaluation processing and found that this component was affected by waiting time before outcome evaluation. Prior research has also suggested that anxious individuals are more prone to detecting threats and susceptible to negative emotions, and show different patterns of brain activity in outcome evaluation. It is quite common that a decision-maker cannot receive feedback immediately; however, few studies have focused on the processing of delayed feedback, especially in subjects who exhibit trait anxiety. In this study, we recruited two groups of subjects with different trait anxiety levels and recorded ERPs when they conducted a time-estimation task with short (0.6–1 s) or long delayed (4–5 s) feedback. The ERP results during the cue phase showed that long waiting cues elicited more negative-going feedback-related negativity (FRN)-like component than short waiting cues in the high trait anxiety (HTA) group. More importantly, the two groups showed different patterns of ERP in the feedback condition. In the low trait anxiety (LTA) group, more positive-going RewP was found in the short-delayed than in the long-delayed condition. In contrast, no difference was found in the HTA group. This pattern may reflect the hyperactivity of the reward systems of HTA individuals in uncertain environments (e.g., the long-delay condition) compared with LTA individuals. Our results provide a direction for future research on the neural mechanisms of reinforcement learning and anxiety.
Highlights
Learning from the environment can help people improve their behavior; performance-related feedback plays a key role in adapting to a changing environment
A large body of research indicates that feedback-related negativity (FRN) reflects decreased phase of dopaminergic signal in the basal ganglia and that the generation of this potential occurs in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; Bellebaum and Daum, 2008; Holroyd et al, 2009; Hauser et al, 2014; Holroyd and Umemoto, 2016; but see Foti et al, 2011; Becker et al, 2014; Sambrook and Goslin, 2016)
The interaction of trait anxiety and feedback valence was significant, F(1,32) = 5.45, p = 0.026, ηp2 = 0.15; pairwise comparison showed that the low trait anxiety (LTA) group felt happier than the high trait anxiety (HTA) group in the correct feedback condition (p = 0.003; Figure 2)
Summary
Learning from the environment can help people improve their behavior; performance-related feedback plays a key role in adapting to a changing environment. According to the reinforcement learning theory, a decision-maker has a high chance to repeat behaviors which provided reward feedbacks and to avoid behaviors which lead to non-reward feedbacks before. The motivation of pursuing reward drives decision-makers select actions associated with high expectation of reward and feedback backward updates corresponding reward expectation of certain actions (Schultz et al, 1997). The so-called reward prediction error refers to the difference between current outcome and expected outcome (Schultz et al, 1997). Researchers found that a particular event-related brain potential (ERP) component, feedback-related negativity (FRN), was highly related to reward prediction error during outcome processing (Holroyd and Coles, 2002). A large body of research indicates that FRN reflects decreased phase of dopaminergic signal in the basal ganglia and that the generation of this potential occurs in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; Bellebaum and Daum, 2008; Holroyd et al, 2009; Hauser et al, 2014; Holroyd and Umemoto, 2016; but see Foti et al, 2011; Becker et al, 2014; Sambrook and Goslin, 2016)
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