Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on December 5, 2007
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm219
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Human Medial Frontal Cortex Activity Predicts Learning from Errors
1 Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Queensland Brain Institute and School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia, 2 School of Behavioural Science, University of Melbourne, Melbourne 3010, Australia, 3 Section on Functional Imaging Methods, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD 20892-1148, USA
Address correspondence to Robert Hester, PhD, Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia. Email: r.hester{at}uq.edu.au.
Learning from errors is a critical feature of human cognition. It underlies our ability to adapt to changing environmental demands and to tune behavior for optimal performance. The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) has been implicated in the evaluation of errors to control behavior, although it has not previously been shown that activity in this region predicts learning from errors. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined activity in the pMFC during an associative learning task in which participants had to recall the spatial locations of 2-digit targets and were provided with immediate feedback regarding accuracy. Activity within the pMFC was significantly greater for errors that were subsequently corrected than for errors that were repeated. Moreover, pMFC activity during recall errors predicted future responses (correct vs. incorrect), despite a sizeable interval (on average 70 s) between an error and the next presentation of the same recall probe. Activity within the hippocampus also predicted future performance and correlated with error-feedback–related pMFC activity. A relationship between performance expectations and pMFC activity, in the absence of differing reinforcement value for errors, is consistent with the idea that error-related pMFC activity reflects the extent to which an outcome is "worse than expected."
Key Words: anterior cingulate cortex • associative learning • error processing • functional MRI