Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Erwin L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany.
Nat Commun. 2024 Jan 2;15(1):19. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-44632-x.
Actions are biased by the outcomes they can produce: Humans are more likely to show action under reward prospect, but hold back under punishment prospect. Such motivational biases derive not only from biased response selection, but also from biased learning: humans tend to attribute rewards to their own actions, but are reluctant to attribute punishments to having held back. The neural origin of these biases is unclear. Specifically, it remains open whether motivational biases arise primarily from the architecture of subcortical regions or also reflect cortical influences, the latter being typically associated with increased behavioral flexibility and control beyond stereotyped behaviors. Simultaneous EEG-fMRI allowed us to track which regions encoded biased prediction errors in which order. Biased prediction errors occurred in cortical regions (dorsal anterior and posterior cingulate cortices) before subcortical regions (striatum). These results highlight that biased learning is not a mere feature of the basal ganglia, but arises through prefrontal cortical contributions, revealing motivational biases to be a potentially flexible, sophisticated mechanism.
人类在有奖励预期的情况下更倾向于采取行动，但在有惩罚预期的情况下则会退缩。这种动机偏差不仅源于有偏差的反应选择，还源于有偏差的学习：人类倾向于将奖励归因于自己的行为，但不愿意将惩罚归因于自己的退缩。这些偏差的神经起源尚不清楚。具体来说，动机偏差主要是由皮质下区域的结构引起的，还是也反映了皮质的影响，后者通常与刻板行为之外的行为灵活性和控制的增加有关，仍存在争议。同时进行的 EEG-fMRI 使我们能够追踪哪些区域按顺序编码有偏差的预测误差。有偏差的预测误差先出现在皮质区域（背侧前扣带和后扣带皮质），然后才出现在皮质下区域（纹状体）。这些结果表明，有偏差的学习不仅仅是基底神经节的一个特征，而是通过前额叶皮质的贡献产生的，这揭示了动机偏差是一种潜在的灵活、复杂的机制。
