Different Task Scenarios Expected In Violation Of The Neural Mechanisms: An Erp Study

To perform efficiently in the changing world, one has to be able to evaluate the outcome of his/her action or ideas as soon as possible and guide his/her future behavior according to the positive or negative feedback. Neuropsychological studies on outcome evaluation have found feedback-related negativity (Feedback related negativity, FRN) and P300, but the results are not consistent among different researches. Some studies suggest that FRN reflects the processing of prediction violation, however, the others disagree this opinion. In addition, there are numbers of studies about semantics prediction violation and arithmetical prediction violation. Researchers found the so-called N400 and P300 evoked by prediction violation in semantics task and the so-called N270/N300 and LPC/P600 evoked by prediction violation in arithmetical task. However, these negative is similar to FRN in gambling task. These similar led us to think that whether or how extent the processing and neural mechanism of prediction violation is the same among this three tasks.The main purpose of this study is to investigate whether or what extent the event-related neurophyscological response in prediction violation in these three tasks is the same. To figure out this problem, our study use a combination of behavior and ERP method of three tasks with within subjects design. There are three ERP experiments in our study. Experiment one, a gambling task, provides us the baseline ERP pattern. In experiment two, we employ a antonym task to obtain the event-related neurophyscological response in semantics prediction violation. In experiment three, we employ an addition task to obtain the ERP pattern in arithmetical prediction violation.Integrated three experimental results and discussions, this study got several conclusions:1. The results obtained by correlation analysis showed that the ERP component is correlated among these three tasks, which suggest that processing and neural mechanism of prediction violation is similar among these tasks. However, there are different in some extent. This finding may reflect that there is a general prediction violation processing in these three tasks and a task-specific processing.2. This study prove indirectly that feedback-related negativity reflects the processing of prediction violation and reflect the abstract "good" and "bad" dimension in the outcome evaluation.