The influence of motivational incentives on error- and feedback-induced learning in children, adolescents, younger and older adults

通过错误和反馈学习是调整我们的行为以适应不同情景需求的重要前提。通过处理来自我们环境的反馈和我们自己的错误，我们学会了如何适当地行事并以目标为导向。对于这些学习过程，中脑多巴胺能系统起着至关重要的作用，因为它不断地根据事件的享乐性价值预测事件，并将实际事件与这些预测进行比较。在上一个项目中，我们研究了这一学习过程的基本机制和年龄相关的损害，发现积极的预期违规行为的处理方式与消极的非常相似，即错误和负面反馈。我们还发现，老年学习过程中的变化与工作记忆能力的损害密切相关。(这些调查结果的详细说明见第1段：最新情况和初步工作。)本项目提案旨在扩大上述调查结果，并审查在整个生命周期内对错误和反馈处理的动机影响。动机对注意力、知觉和记忆等认知过程的影响是有据可查的。此外，许多实证研究隐含地假设，特别是金钱激励会影响参与者专心认真地从事手头任务的动机，因为他们的参与是有报酬的(经常甚至取决于他们的表现)。关于错误和反馈处理的研究也经常使用金钱上的得失作为反馈。因此，虽然已知动机激励调节认知过程，但动机本身几乎从来不是研究的对象，因为人们假设它不影响基本的加工。然而，当研究错误和反馈加工时，这一假设必须受到质疑，因为大脑结构的加工动机与加工错误和反馈有很大的重叠。此外，货币(和其他)激励的主观价值在整个生命周期内都会发生变化。因此，这项后续建议的主要目标是在综合范式中比较不同激励类型对儿童、青少年、年轻人和老年人的影响。可能的激励类型包括金钱激励，如输赢、抽象、认知绩效反馈，主要增强剂，如糖果，以及社会激励，如获得社会认可。

Learning via errors and feedback is an important prerequisite for adjusting our behavior to different situational demands. By processing feedback from our environment and our own errors, we learn how to behave adequately and goal-directed. For these learning processes, the midbrain dopaminergic system plays a crucial role because it continuously predicts events in terms of their hedonistic value and compares the actual events with these predictions. In the previous project, we examined the basic mechanisms and age-related impairments of this learning process and found that positive expectancy violations are processed in a very similar manner as negative ones, i.e. errors and negative feedback. We also found that changes in this learning process in old age are tightly connected with impairments in working memory capacity. (A detailed description of these findings can be found in paragraph 1: State of the Art and Preliminary Work.)The present project proposal aims at broadening the above findings and examine motivational influences on error and feedback processing across the lifespan. Motivational influences on cognitive processes like attention, perception, and memory are well documented. Additionally, many empirical studies implicitly assume that especially monetary incentives affect the motivation of participants to attentively and seriously work on the task at hand because they are paid for their participation (oftentimes even dependent on their performance). Studies on error and feedback processing also oftentimes use monetary wins and losses as feedback. Thus, although it is known that motivational incentives modulate cognitive processes, the incentive itself is almost never the object of investigation because it is assumed that it does not influence the basic processing. However, this assumption has to be questioned when investigating error and feedback processing because there is a large overlap in brain structures processing incentives and those processing errors and feedback. Additionally, the subjective value of monetary (and other) incentives changes across the lifespan. For this reason, the main goal of this follow-up proposal is to compare the effect of different incentive types in children, adolescents, younger and older adults in an integrative paradigm. Possible types of incentives are monetary incentives, like wins and losses, abstract, cognitive performance feedback, primary reinforcers, like candy, and social incentives, like obtaining social acceptance.