Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on October 19, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp224
The Importance of Failure: Feedback-Related Negativity Predicts Motor Learning Efficiency
1 Department of Cognitive Psychology and Ergonomics, University of Twente, 7522 NB Enschede, the Netherlands, 2 Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, 5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands
Address correspondence to Maarten A. S. Boksem, Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands. Email: Maarten{at}Boksem.nl.
Learning from past mistakes is of prominent importance for successful future behavior. In the present study, we tested whether reinforcement learning signals in the brain are predictive of adequate learning of a sequence of motor actions. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while subjects engaged in a sequence learning task. The results showed that brain responses to feedback (the feedback-related negativity [FRN]) predicted whether subjects learned to avoid an erroneous response the next time this action had to be performed. Our findings add to a growing literature on feedback-based performance adjustment, by showing that FRN amplitudes may reflect the acquisition of motor skill and the consolidation of contingencies between stimuli or cues and their associated responses, providing evidence that learning efficiency and future performance can be predicted by the neural response to current feedback: FRN amplitude associated with a mistake is predictive of whether this mistake will be repeated, or learned from.
Key Words: ACC • ERP • FRN • reinforcement learning
Jurjen van der Helden and Maarten A. S. Boksem have contributed equally to this work.