Differential Effect of Reward and Punishment on Procedural Learning

Wächter, Tobias; Lungu, Ovidiu; Liu, Tao; Willingham, Daniel T.; Ashe, James

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.4132-08.2009

Cited by 179 publications

(218 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Previous studies have identified insular cortex activity during punishment (Sanfey et al, 2003;Ullsperger and von Cramon, 2003;Seymour et al, 2004;Wächter et al, 2009), with the level of activity linked to the magnitude of (Elliott et al, 2000) and individual sensitivity to (Samanez-Larkin et al, 2008) punishment. Insula activity in response to punishment has also been shown to be greatest when it precedes a change in decision making , with recent evidence suggesting that it may represent an aversive prediction error (Pessiglione et al, 2006).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punishing an Error Improves Learning: The Influence of Punishment Magnitude on Error-Related Neural Activity and Subsequent Learning

Hester¹,

Murphy²,

Brown³

et al. 2010

J. Neurosci.

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Punishing an error to shape subsequent performance is a major tenet of individual and societal level behavioral interventions. Recent work examining error-related neural activity has identified that the magnitude of activity in the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) is predictive of learning from an error, whereby greater activity in this region predicts adaptive changes in future cognitive performance. It remains unclear how punishment influences error-related neural mechanisms to effect behavior change, particularly in key regions such as pMFC, which previous work has demonstrated to be insensitive to punishment. Using an associative learning task that provided monetary reward and punishment for recall performance, we observed that when recall errors were categorized by subsequent performance-whether the failure to accurately recall a number-location association was corrected at the next presentation of the same trial-the magnitude of error-related pMFC activity predicted future correction. However, the pMFC region was insensitive to the magnitude of punishment an error received and it was the left insula cortex that predicted learning from the most aversive outcomes. These findings add further evidence to the hypothesis that error-related pMFC activity may reflect more than a prediction error in representing the value of an outcome. The novel role identified here for the insular cortex in learning from punishment appears particularly compelling for our understanding of psychiatric and neurologic conditions that feature both insular cortex dysfunction and a diminished capacity for learning from negative feedback or punishment.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punishing an Error Improves Learning: The Influence of Punishment Magnitude on Error-Related Neural Activity and Subsequent Learning

Hester¹,

Murphy²,

Brown³

et al. 2010

J. Neurosci.

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“…This observation adds to other evidence demonstrating that positive feedback during learning may act as an internal reinforcer, instilling a sense of intrinsic reward motivation (subjective achievement) which improves learning on the current and subsequent trials. This is true for declarative (Mather and Schoeke, 2011) and procedural (Wächter et al, 2009) memory, as well as in perceptual learning (Seitz and Watanabe, 2005), where even performanceunrelated (i.e., fake) feedback produces such results (Shibata et al, 2009). …”

Section: Incidental Learning During State Of Reward Motivationmentioning

confidence: 94%

Influence of reward motivation on human declarative memory

Miendlarzewska

Bavelier

Schwartz

2016

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

146

134

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a b s t r a c tMotivational relevance can prioritize information for memory encoding and consolidation based on reward value. In this review, we pinpoint the possible psychological and neural mechanisms by which reward promotes learning, from guiding attention to enhancing memory consolidation. We then discuss how reward value can spill-over from one conditioned stimulus to a non-conditioned stimulus. Such generalization can occur across perceptually similar items or through more complex relations, such as associative or logical inferences. Existing evidence suggests that the neurotransmitter dopamine boosts the formation of declarative memory for rewarded information and may also control the generalization of reward values. In particular, temporally-correlated activity in the hippocampus and in regions of the dopaminergic circuit may mediate value-based decisions and facilitate cross-item integration. Given the importance of generalization in learning, our review points to the need to study not only how reward affects later memory but how learned reward values may generalize to related representations and ultimately alter memory structure.

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“…The anterior insula plays a key role in visceral representation and emotional awareness (Nieuwenhuys, 2012). The insula has also been identified as having a role in punishment learning (Wachter et al, 2009;Hester et al, 2010) and the regulation of attention to aversive emotional cues (Straube & Miltner, 2011), especially disgust (Deen et al, 2011). Altered insula activation is seen in individuals with anxiety disorders (Shah et al, 2009) and phobias (Rosso et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%