University of Melbourne, Department of Psychological Sciences, Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia.
J Neurosci. 2010 Nov 17;30(46):15600-7. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2565-10.2010.
Punishing an error to shape subsequent performance is a major tenet of individual and societal level behavioral interventions. Recent work examining error-related neural activity has identified that the magnitude of activity in the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) is predictive of learning from an error, whereby greater activity in this region predicts adaptive changes in future cognitive performance. It remains unclear how punishment influences error-related neural mechanisms to effect behavior change, particularly in key regions such as pMFC, which previous work has demonstrated to be insensitive to punishment. Using an associative learning task that provided monetary reward and punishment for recall performance, we observed that when recall errors were categorized by subsequent performance--whether the failure to accurately recall a number-location association was corrected at the next presentation of the same trial--the magnitude of error-related pMFC activity predicted future correction. However, the pMFC region was insensitive to the magnitude of punishment an error received and it was the left insula cortex that predicted learning from the most aversive outcomes. These findings add further evidence to the hypothesis that error-related pMFC activity may reflect more than a prediction error in representing the value of an outcome. The novel role identified here for the insular cortex in learning from punishment appears particularly compelling for our understanding of psychiatric and neurologic conditions that feature both insular cortex dysfunction and a diminished capacity for learning from negative feedback or punishment.
惩罚错误以塑造后续表现是个体和社会层面行为干预的主要原则。最近研究错误相关神经活动的工作表明，后内侧前额皮质（pMFC）的活动幅度可预测从错误中学习，该区域的活动越大，预示着未来认知表现的适应性变化越大。目前尚不清楚惩罚如何影响错误相关的神经机制以实现行为改变，特别是在 pMFC 等关键区域，先前的研究表明该区域对惩罚不敏感。使用提供回忆表现的金钱奖励和惩罚的联想学习任务，我们观察到，当回忆错误根据后续表现进行分类时——即未能准确回忆数字-位置关联是否在下一次呈现相同试验时得到纠正——错误相关 pMFC 活动的幅度可预测未来的纠正。然而，pMFC 区域对错误所受到的惩罚程度不敏感，而左侧脑岛皮层则可预测从最令人厌恶的结果中学习。这些发现进一步支持了错误相关 pMFC 活动可能不仅仅反映了对结果价值的预测错误的假设。这里发现的脑岛皮层在从惩罚中学习的新作用对于我们理解具有脑岛皮层功能障碍和从负面反馈或惩罚中学习能力下降的精神和神经疾病特别有说服力。
