Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science Institute of Psychology Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing China.
Department of Psychology University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing China.
Brain Behav. 2017 Apr 4;7(5):e00672. doi: 10.1002/brb3.672. eCollection 2017 May.
Outcome feedback which indicates behavioral consequences are crucial for reinforcement learning and environmental adaptation. Nevertheless, outcome information in daily life is often totally or partially ambiguous. Studying how people interpret this kind of information would provide important knowledge about the human evaluative system.
This study concentrates on the neural processing of partially ambiguous feedback, that is, either its valence or magnitude is unknown to participants. To address this topic, we sequentially presented valence and magnitude information; electroencephalography (EEG) response to each kind of presentation was recorded and analyzed. The event-related potential components feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P3 were used as indices of neural activity.
Consistent with previous literature, the FRN elicited by ambiguous valence was not significantly different from that elicited by negative valence. On the other hand, the FRN elicited by ambiguous magnitude was larger than both the large and small magnitude, indicating the motivation to seek unambiguous magnitude information. The P3 elicited by ambiguous valence and ambiguous magnitude was not significantly different from that elicited by negative valence and small magnitude, respectively, indicating the emotional significance of feedback ambiguity. Finally, the aforementioned effects also manifested in the stage of information integration.
These findings indicate both similarities and discrepancies between the processing of valence ambiguity and that of magnitude ambiguity, which may help understand the mechanisms of ambiguous information processing.
结果反馈表明行为后果对强化学习和环境适应至关重要。然而，日常生活中的结果信息往往是完全或部分模糊的。研究人们如何解释这种信息将提供有关人类评价系统的重要知识。
本研究集中于部分模糊反馈的神经处理，即参与者不知道其效价或大小。为了解决这个问题，我们依次呈现了效价和大小信息；记录并分析了每种呈现的脑电图（EEG）反应。事件相关电位成分反馈相关负波（FRN）和 P3 被用作神经活动的指标。
与先前的文献一致，模糊效价引起的 FRN 与负效价引起的 FRN 没有显著差异。另一方面，模糊大小引起的 FRN 大于大、小两种大小，表明了寻求明确大小信息的动机。模糊效价和模糊大小引起的 P3 与负效价和小效价引起的 P3 没有显著差异，表明反馈模糊的情绪意义。最后，上述效应也表现在信息整合阶段。
这些发现表明效价模糊和大小模糊的处理既有相似之处，也有不同之处，这可能有助于理解模糊信息处理的机制。
