Top-down control over feedback processing: The probability of valid feedback affects feedback-related brain activity

Differential effects of instructed and objective feedback reliability on feedback‐related brain activity

“…The results from Experiment 1 nicely align with previous research showing a reduced fronto‐central valence effect when feedback reliability is low (Ernst & Steinhauser, , ; Schiffer et al, ; Walentowska et al, ). However, our results unequivocally demonstrate that this result reflects a top‐down effect due to explicit knowledge about feedback reliability.…”

“…Because unreliable feedback is misleading and thus detrimental for decision making, it is essential to consider not only feedback itself but also its reliability when evaluating a decision. While several recent studies could show that unreliable feedback is accompanied by reduced feedback‐related brain activity (Ernst & Steinhauser, , ; Li, Peng, Li, & Holroyd, ; Schiffer, Siletti, Waszak, & Yeung, ; Walentowska, Moors, Paul, & Pourtois, ), it still unclear whether these effects reflect top‐down control over feedback processing due to knowledge about feedback reliability or whether they are simply due to learning a decreased feedback‐outcome contingency. To address this question, we considered feedback‐related brain activity in ERPs in two experiments in which two levels of feedback reliability were instructed (Experiment 1) or objectively manipulated (Experiment 2).…”

“…Several studies investigated effects of feedback reliability on these ERP components using a variety of paradigms, including reversal learning (Schiffer et al, ), time estimation (Li, Peng, et al, ), a go/no‐go task (Walentowska et al, ), or a learn‐test paradigm (Ernst & Steinhauser, , ). Common to all these tasks is that participants have to learn the correct response (Ernst & Steinhauser, , ; Schiffer et al, ) or optimize their decision behavior (Li, Peng, et al, ), while being informed that the feedback is either unreliable, meaning that it often does not reflect their true performance or is uninformative. In most studies, instructions were provided that truthfully informed about the actual feedback reliability, sometimes additionally cued by a stimulus (Li, Peng, et al, ) or stimulus characteristics (Ernst & Steinhauser, ; Walentowska et al, ).…”

“…In most studies, instructions were provided that truthfully informed about the actual feedback reliability, sometimes additionally cued by a stimulus (Li, Peng, et al, ) or stimulus characteristics (Ernst & Steinhauser, ; Walentowska et al, ). Some of these studies reported a reduced fronto‐central valence effect for unreliable compared to reliable feedback (Ernst & Steinhauser, , ; Schiffer et al, ; Walentowska et al, ) suggesting that feedback reliability influences the generation or utilization of reward prediction errors, while others did not find such an effect (Li, Peng, et al, ; Walentowska et al, , experiment 2). Moreover, most of these studies also reported a reduced P3 following unreliable feedback compared to reliable feedback (Ernst & Steinhauser, ; Schiffer et al, ; Walentowska et al, ), suggesting that feedback reliability also influences feedback processing by an explicit learning mechanism.…”

“…Based on the effects of feedback reliability on the fronto‐central valence effect, we have proposed that unreliable feedback implies a suppression of the generation or utilization of reward prediction errors via top‐down control (Ernst & Steinhauser, ) or a top‐down devaluation of unreliable feedback (Ernst & Steinhauser, ). In general, concepts of top‐down control over RL are in line with studies showing that false instructions about reward contingencies can bias RL in a trial‐and‐error learning paradigm (Doll, Jacobs, Sanfey, & Frank, ), which is particularly pronounced in participants with a more stable representation of the misleading instruction (Doll, Hutchison, & Frank, ).…”