Intrinsic Emotional Relevance of Outcomes and Prediction Error
Their Influence on Early Processing of Subsequent Stimulus During Reversal Learning
Abstract
Infrequent events, such as unexpected absence of outcomes (prediction errors), have a detrimental effect on performance of subsequent trial in various cognitive tasks. In the present event-related potential study, we tested whether the influence of prediction error manifests itself in the early cortical processing of subsequent stimuli. Participants performed a reversal learning task in which they saw two alternating pairs of faces and indicated for each pair which one would have a declared target stimulus on its nose. The target switched to the other face after several consecutive trials with correct response, thereby inducing a prediction error, with the switch being indicated by the appearance of a disk (unexpected neutral outcome) or a spider (unexpected unpleasant outcome), depending on the condition. Results showed that after both unexpected and expected unpleasant outcomes, the amplitude of P2 decreased, while after both unexpected neutral and unpleasant outcomes, the amplitude of P1 increased on the following presentation of the pair of faces. Source localization analysis suggested that the differences mainly emanated from the cuneus and precuneus with respect to the P1 and P2 time ranges respectively. We conclude that both the intrinsic emotional relevance of outcomes and prediction error may modulate attention allocation.
References
(2001). Changes in neuronal activation with increasing attention demand in healthy volunteers: An fMRI study. Synapse, 42, 266–272.
(2005). Attentional bias in anxiety: A behavioral and ERP study. Brain and Cognition, 59, 11–22.
(2005). Cognitive control involved in overcoming prepotent response tendencies and switching between tasks. Cerebral Cortex, 15, 899–912.
(2008). Learning-related changes in reward expectancy are reflected in the feedback-related negativity. European Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 1823–1835.
(2009). Neural correlates of affective picture processing – a depth ERP study. NeuroImage, 47, 376–383.
(2009). Cross-modal emotional attention: Emotional voices modulate early stages of visual processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21, 1670–1679.
(2008). Beyond fear: Rapid spatial orienting toward positive emotional stimuli. Psychological Science, 19, 362–370.
(2001). Emotion and attention interaction studied through event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 13, 1109–1128.
(2001). Emotion, attention, and the ‘negativity bias’, studied through event-related potentials. International Journal Psychophysiology, 41, 75–85.
(2010). Outcome expectancy and not accuracy determines posterror slowing: ERP support. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 10, 270–278.
(1996). Spatial selective attention affects early extrastriate but not striate components of the visual evoked potential. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 8, 387–402.
(2005). What is novel in the novelty oddball paradigm? Functional significance of the novelty P3 event-related potential as revealed by independent component analysis. Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research, 22, 309–321.
(1975). Unmasking the human face: A guide to recognizing emotions from facial expressions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
(2010). Neural plasticity in response to attention training in anxiety. Psychological Medicine, 40, 667–677.
(2003). Appraisal processes in emotion. In , Handbook of affective sciences (pp. 572–595). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
(2002). An electrophysiological and behavioral investigation of involuntary attention towards auditory frequency, duration and intensity changes. Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research, 14, 325–332.
(2003). Attention capture by auditory significant stimuli: Semantic analysis follows attention switching. European Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 2408–2412.
(1993). A neural system for error detection and compensation. Psychological Science, 4, 385–390.
(2004). Electrical neuroimaging based on biophysical constraints. NeuroImage, 21, 527–539.
(2005). Brain potentials associated with expected and unexpected good and bad outcomes. Psychophysiology, 42, 161–170.
(2008). Oops! I did it again: An ERP and behavioral study of double-errors. Brain and Cognition, 68, 15–21.
(2007). Reward prediction error signals associated with a modified time estimation task. Psychophysiology, 44, 913–917.
(2000). The neural mechanisms of top-down attentional control. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 284–291.
(2008). Early neuronal responses in right limbic structures mediate harmony incongruity processing in musical experts. NeuroImage, 42, 1597–1608.
(2011). Attentional orienting towards emotion: P2 and N400 ERP effects. Neuropsychologia, 49, 3121–3129.
(1990). Visual event-related potentials index focused attention within bilateral stimulus arrays. II. Functional dissociation of P1 and N1 components. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 75, 528–542.
(1995). Neural mechanisms of visual selective attention. Psychophysiology, 32, 4–18.
(2001). Noninvasive localization of electromagnetic epileptic activity. I. Method descriptions and simulations. Brain Topography, 14, 131–137.
(2009). Neural substrates of contingency learning and executive control: Dissociating physical, valuative, and behavioral changes. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 3, 23.
(2009). Instinctive modulation of cognitive behavior: A human evoked potential study. Human Brain Mapping, 30, 2120–2131.
(2011). Neural response to the behaviorally relevant absence of anticipated outcomes and the presentation of potentially harmful stimuli: A human fMRI study. Cortex, 47, 191–201.
(2009). Post-error slowing: An orienting account. Cognition, 111, 275–279.
(1987). Mapping of scalp potentials by surface spline interpolation. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 66, 75–81.
(2000). Guidelines for using human event-related potentials to study cognition: Recording standards and publication criteria. Psychophysiology, 37, 127–152.
(2011). Early error detection predicted by reduced pre-response control process: An ERP topographic mapping study. Brain Topography, 23, 403–422.
(2005). Enhanced extrastriate visual response to bandpass spatial frequency filtered fearful faces: Time course and topographic evoked-potentials mapping. Human Brain Mapping, 26, 65–79.
(2004). Electrophysiological correlates of rapid spatial orienting toward fearful faces. Cerebral Cortex, 14, 619–633.
(2005). Emotion and attention interactions in social cognition: Brain regions involved in processing anger prosody. NeuroImage, 28, 848–858.
(2005). A systems approach to appraisal mechanisms in emotion. Neural Networks, 18, 317–352.
(2001). Appraisal considered as a process of multi-level sequential checking. In , Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research (pp. 92–120). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
(2008). The confabulating mind: How the brain creates reality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
(2007). Early cortical response to behaviorally relevant absence of anticipated outcomes: A human event-related potential study. NeuroImage, 35, 1348–1355.
(1995). Fear of Spiders Questionnaire. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 26, 31–34.
(2005). How brains beware: Neural mechanisms of emotional attention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 585–594.
(2007). Modulation of visual processing by attention and emotion: Windows on causal interactions between human brain regions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362, 837–855.
(2004). Error-related negativity reflects detection of negative reward prediction error. NeuroReport, 15, 2561–2565.
