An ERP Study Of Counterfactual Thinking Evaluation After Decision-making

Counterfactual thinking occurs when an individual experiences thoughts that ignore what has happened in the past, and generates a new hypothesis. It is a cognitive process of comparing "what is" with "what might have been", and based on the comparison occurs an emotional experience. There are plenty of behavioral researches on this topic, but seldom studies investigate its neural mechanism, especially the relationship between the cognitive process and emotional experience of counterfactual thinking. It is generally believed that anchoring effects is connected with contrast effects and hindsight bias, "what might have been" is regarded as a self-generated anchor, and contrast effects happen when "what is" comparing with "what might have been". Although there are researches have inferred the neural mechanism of anchoring effects indirectly, there is no study explores it directly so far. Thus the aim of the present study is to explore neural correlates of the anchoring effects of counterfactual thinking through ERP technology.The experiment I investigated the neurophysiological evidence of counterfactual thinking through a simple gambling task in a real situation, in which the feedback modes were manipulated with partial and complete. There are two main purposes of this experiment:1.exploring the dynamic process of counterfactual thinking, and founding out is there a specific ERP component for this cognitive process; 2. exploring the cognitive process of upward and downward counterfactual thinking. The results showed that both the amplitudes of FRN and P300 enhanced during reflected downward counterfactual thinking processes, while only the FRN reflected downward counterfactual thinking. Moreover, dipole analysis indicated that the dipole was located in the anterior cortex. This suggests that the FRN and p300 are both sensitive to counterfactual thinking, and that the ACC may be an important neural structure in the modulation of counterfactual thinking.In experimentâ…¡, participants performed a simple gambling task manipulated with two feedbacks and three different anchoring conditions in a real situation, in order to investigate the anchoring effects of counterfactual thinking. There are also two purposes of this experiment:1. to make sure whether there is the anchoring effect in counterfactual thinking; 2.exploring different ERP components of counterfactual thinking in different anchoring conditions. The results indicated that FRN and P300 reflected the anchoring effect in counterfactual thinking. In upward condition, the anchor is higher, the bigger the negative deflection of the FRN, but the smaller the amplitude of P300. In downward condition, both FRN and P300 showed the base point anchoring effects, which means when the anchor was 0, the amplitude of FRN fell to its bottom while P300 reached its peak.