Counterfactual Thinking In The Feedback Stimuli Processing

Thorndike (EL Thorndike), the famous American educational psychologist, said: the basic learning way for the human beings is trial and error. People learn adaptive behaviors through their interaction with the outside environment by "trial and error", an important function of the human brain, which based on the evaluation of the feedback results to the behavior. In recent years, with the outcome evaluation becoming the hot spot in the field of cognitive neuroscience, a lot of studies on the feedback processing have emerged.As their behavior affecting the environment, individuals get feedback information from the environment as well, so that they know if their action is right or wrong. It is through this information could the individuals evaluate their behavior, as well as expericing the corresponding emotional responses.In the process of evaluating the results of feedback, people tend to compare the outcome of "what is" to "what might have been". This mental processing is called counterfactual thinking, occurs when an individual make an hypothetical deny of what has happened (Tversky&Kahneman,1982,1990), with the comparative thinking of the actual outcome and the possible outcome. Wang et al., investigated the neurophysiological evidence of counterfactual thinking through a simple gambling task, with the manipulation of partial feedback and complete feedback. They found FRN and P300are sensitive components of counterfactual thinking. However, some researchers have found that the FRN is sensitive to the physical characterictics of the feedback stimuli, therefore, what lead to the significance of the ERPs components is hard to say, whether it’s the difference of the physical characteristics of the two kinds of feedbacks or the differences of the two kinds of feedbacks themselves.In order to separate the two mixed variables, the present study made a slight change to Wang’s paradigm.In experiment1, we adopt the simple gambling task, manipulate the presentation order of the feedback stimuli and observe the process of counterfactual thinking, to investigate whether there exist specific ERPs components of counterfactual thinking. The results showed that:①FRN is not a sensitive component of counterfactual thinking;②The counterfactual thinking are reflected in the P300component;The second experiment tries to take a further step of the analysis to see if the P300has an emotional function during the processing of the counterfactual thinking. In other words, whether the P300can reflect the difference of the emotional intensity between the upward and the downward counterfactual thinking. The results showed that: the amplitude of P300can show the above-mentioned difference.