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Johannes Hewig
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2017) 29 (3): 424–434.
Published: 01 March 2017
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Hundreds of ERP studies have reported a midfrontal negative-going amplitude shift following negative compared with positive action outcomes. This feedback-related negativity (FRN) effect is typically thought to reflect an early and binary mechanism of action evaluation in the posterior midcingulate cortex. However, in prior research on the FRN effect, the instantaneous value and the long-term value of action outcomes have been perfectly confounded. That is, instantaneously positive outcomes were generally consistent with task goals, whereas instantaneously negative outcomes were inconsistent with task goals. In this study, we disentangled these two outcome aspects in two experiments. Our results reveal an interaction of instantaneous and long-term outcome values. More precisely, our findings strongly suggest that the FRN effect is mainly driven by a reward positivity, which is evoked only by outcomes that possess an instantaneously positive value and also help the organism to reach its long-term goals. These findings add to a recent literature according to which the posterior midcingulate cortex acts as a hierarchical reinforcement learning system and suggest that this system integrates instant and long-term action–outcome values. This, in turn, might be crucial for learning optimal behavioral strategies in a given setting.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2009) 21 (8): 1642–1652.
Published: 01 August 2009
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Recent research has focused on decision-making under risk and its neural bases. Two kinds of bad decisions under risk may be defined: too risky decisions and too cautious decisions. Here we show that suboptimal decisions of both kinds lead to increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex in a Blackjack gambling task. Moreover, this increased activity is related to the avoidance of the negatively evaluated decision under risk. These findings complement other results suggesting an important role of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in reward-based decision-making and conflict resolution.