eLife paper in the Sterzer Lab
Matthias Guggenmos1, 2, Gregor Wilbertz2, Martin Hebart3 and Philipp Sterzer1, 2 demonstrate that, in the absence of external feedback, neural confidence signals show an intriguing parallel to signals previously observed for reward feedback.
Not only were confidence signals represented in reward areas of the human brain, they also displayed a temporal pattern that has classically been associated with reward: immediately before human observers engaged in a challenging perceptual discrimination task, neural activity reflected the predicted confidence in the task; when the stimulus was finally shown, neural activity reflected a prediction error signal that indicated how surprising the observers’ actual confidence was compared to the predicted confidence. These prediction error signals were related to individual perceptual learning success and could thus explain perceptual learning without feedback as a form of internal reinforcement learning.
1Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin
2 Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin
3 University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
Original publication:
Guggenmos M, Wilbertz G, Hebart MN, Sterzer P (2016). Mesolimbic confidence signals guide perceptual learning in the absence of external feedback. eLife 5, 1–19.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.13388
Contact:
Dr. Matthias Guggenmos
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Charitéplatz 1
10117 Berlin
Tel: +49 (0)30-450-517131
Email: matthias.guggenmos@charite.de