Start date should be earlier than end date. OK Please enter valid date format.

Original Research ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

Better than expected or as bad as you thought? The neurocognitive development of probabilistic feedback processing

Wouter van den Bos^1,2*, Berna Güroğlu^1,2, Bianca G. van den Bulk¹, Serge A.R.B. Rombouts^1,2,3 and Eveline A. Crone^1,2

Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands

Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

Learning from feedback lies at the foundation of adaptive behavior. Two prior neuroimaging studies have suggested that there are qualitative differences in how children and adults use feedback by demonstrating that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and parietal cortex were more active after negative feedback for adults, but after positive feedback for children. In the current study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test whether this difference is related to valence or informative value of the feedback by examining neural responses to negative and positive feedback while applying probabilistic rules. In total, 67 healthy volunteers between ages 8 and 22 participated in the study (8–11 years, n = 18; 13–16 years, n = 27; 18–22 years, n = 22). Behavioral comparisons showed that all participants were able to learn probabilistic rules equally well. DLPFC and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex were more active in younger children following positive feedback and in adults following negative feedback, but only when exploring alternative rules, not when applying the most advantageous rules. These findings suggest that developmental differences in neural responses to feedback are not related to valence per se, but that there is an age-related change in processing learning signals with different informative value.

Keywords:

development, fMRI, feedback, decision-making, learning, cognitive control

Citation:

van den Bos W, Güroğlu B, van den Bulk BG, Rombouts SARB and Crone EA (2009). Better than expected or as bad as you thought? The neurocognitive development of probabilistic feedback processing. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 3:52. doi: 10.3389/neuro.09.052.2009

Received:

21 August 2009;

Paper pending published:

12 September 2009;

Accepted:

03 November 2009;

Published online:

01 December 2009.

Edited by:

Elizabeth D. O'Hare, University of California at Berkeley, USA

Reviewed by:

Adriana Galván, University of California, USA
Monique Ernst, National Institute of Mental Health, USA

© 2009 van den Bos, Güroğlu, van den Bulk, Rombouts and Crone. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Wouter van den Bos, Department of Psychology, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2300 RB, Leiden, The Netherlands. e-mail: WBos@fsw.leidenuniv.nl