A tradeoff relationship between internal monitoring and external feedback during the dynamic process of reinforcement learning.

Effective behavior monitoring, including internal monitoring/error detection and external monitoring/feedback, is very pivotal for reinforcement learning. However, less attention has been paid to internal monitoring and the dynamic learning performance in reinforcement learning, and there is still a heated debate on which kind of external feedback is relied on in the reinforcement learning. In order to address these questions, an adaption probabilistic selection task was used to examine the effect of the internal monitoring, external feedback and the relationship between them for approach learners and avoidance learners during dynamic learning process of reinforcement learning and behavior adaption. Error-related negativity (ERN), feedback-related negativity (FRN) and feedback-related P300 are three ERPs components, which can be used as the indexes of internal monitoring, external feedback and behavior adaption. For our results, the ERN effect of avoidance learners become large in block 3, which is earlier than approach learners (block 4). This phenomenon suggests that avoidance learners learned faster than approach learners. In addition, the FRN amplitude of avoidance learners in block 4 was significantly smaller than the other three blocks. The aforementioned results demonstrated a tradeoff relationship between the ERN and FRN effects.