Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Berlin Institute of Health, Chariteplatz 1, 10117, Berlin, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin, 10115, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Berlin Institute of Health, Chariteplatz 1, 10117, Berlin, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2020 Jul 1;214:116701. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116701. Epub 2020 Mar 3.
It is well-established that increased sensory uncertainty impairs perceptual decision-making and leads to degraded neural stimulus representations. Recently, we also showed that providing unreliable feedback to choices leads to changes in perceptual decision-making similar to those of increased stimulus noise: A deterioration in objective task performance, a decrease in subjective confidence and a lower reliance on sensory information for perceptual inference. To investigate the neural basis of such feedback-based changes in perceptual decision-making, in the present study, two groups of healthy human participants (n = 15 each) performed a challenging visual orientation discrimination task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Critically, one group received reliable feedback regarding their task performance in an intervention phase, whereas the other group correspondingly received unreliable feedback - thereby keeping stimulus information constant. The effects of feedback reliability on performance and stimulus representation in the primary visual cortex (V1) were studied by comparing the pre- and post-intervention test phases between the groups. Compared to participants who received reliable feedback, those receiving unreliable feedback showed a decline in task performance that was paralleled by reduced distinctness of fMRI response patterns in V1. These results show that environmental uncertainty can affect perceptual inference at the earliest cortical processing stages.
已经证实，感觉不确定性的增加会损害知觉决策，并导致神经刺激表示的降级。最近，我们还表明，向选择提供不可靠的反馈会导致知觉决策发生类似于增加刺激噪声的变化：客观任务表现恶化，主观信心降低，以及对知觉推断的感觉信息依赖降低。为了研究基于反馈的知觉决策变化的神经基础，在本研究中，两组健康的人类参与者（每组 15 人）在进行功能磁共振成像（fMRI）的同时执行了一项具有挑战性的视觉方向辨别任务。关键的是，一组在干预阶段收到了关于其任务表现的可靠反馈，而另一组则相应地收到了不可靠的反馈-从而保持刺激信息不变。通过比较两组的干预前后测试阶段，研究了反馈可靠性对初级视觉皮层（V1）中性能和刺激表示的影响。与收到可靠反馈的参与者相比，收到不可靠反馈的参与者的任务表现下降，而 V1 中的 fMRI 反应模式的清晰度降低。这些结果表明，环境不确定性会影响最早的皮层处理阶段的知觉推断。
