Mushtaq, Faisal and Stoet, Gijsbert and Bland, Amy Rachel and Schae- fer, Alexandre (2013) Relative Changes from Prior Reward Contingencies Can Constrain Brain Correlates of Outcome

Publication Summary

It is well-known that the affective value of an environment can be relative to whether it reflects an improvement or a worsening from a previous state. A potential explanation for this phenomenon suggests that relative changes from previous reward contingencies can constrain how brain monitoring systems form predictions about future events. In support of this idea, we found that changes per se relative to previous states of learned reward contingencies modulated the FeedbackRelated Negativity (FRN), a human brain potential known to index discrepancies between predictions and affective outcomes. Specifically, we observed that environments with a 50% reward probability yielded different FRN patterns according to whether they reflected an improvement or a worsening from a previous environment. Further, we also found that this pattern of results was driven mainly by variations in the amplitude of ERPs to positive outcomes. Overall, these results suggest that relative changes in reward probability from previous learned environments can constrain how neural systems of outcome monitoring formulate predictions about the likelihood of future rewards and nonrewards. Citation: Mushtaq F, Stoet G, Bland AR, Schaefer A (2013) Relative Changes from Prior Reward Contingencies Can Constrain Brain Correlates of Outcome Monitoring. PLoS ONE 8(6): e66350. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0066350 Editor: Aldo Rustichini, University of Minnesota, United States of America Received February 26, 2013; Accepted May 6, 2013; Published June 20, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Mushtaq et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Funding for this study was provided by the University of Leeds (UK), and no additional external funding was received for this study. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: [email protected] (FM); [email protected] (AS)