Feedback-related EEG dynamics separately reflect decision parameters, biases, and future choices

• Published in: NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 259; p. 119437
• Main Authors: Kirschner, Hans, Fischer, Adrian G., Ullsperger, Markus
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01-10-2022; Elsevier Limited; Elsevier
• Subjects: Bias; Chefs; Computer applications; Decision making; EEG; Electroencephalography; Explicit knowledge; Feedback; Food; Food quality; Learning behavior; Regression analysis; Restaurants
• ISSN: 1053-8119; 1095-9572
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119437

•We examined how task-irrelevant information biases our decisions.•Task-irrelevant information biases learning and behaviour despite explicit knowledge of its irrelevance.•These biases are represented in a dynamic and spatiotemporally dissociable sequence of feedback-related EEG activity.•A common centroparietal positivity reflects a signal that is interpreted by downstream learning processes that adjust future behaviour.
Optimal decision making in complex environments requires dynamic learning from unexpected events. To speed up learning, we should heavily weight information that indicates state-action-outcome contingency changes and ignore uninformative fluctuations in the environment. Often, however, unrelated information is hard to ignore and can potentially bias our learning. Here we used computational modelling and EEG to investigate learning behaviour in a modified probabilistic choice task that introduced two task-irrelevant factors that were uninformative for optimal task performance, but nevertheless could potentially bias learning: pay-out magnitudes were varied randomly and, occasionally, feedback presentation was enhanced by visual surprise. We found that participants’ overall good learning performance was biased by distinct effects of these non-normative factors. On the neural level, these parameters are represented in a dynamic and spatiotemporally dissociable sequence of EEG activity. Later in feedback processing the different streams converged on a central to centroparietal positivity reflecting a signal that is interpreted by downstream learning processes that adjust future behaviour.