Cortical plasticity elicited by acoustically cued monetary losses: an ERP study

Abstract

Both human and animal studies have demonstrated remarkable findings of experience-induced plasticity in the cortex. Here, we investigated whether the widely used monetary incentive delay (MID) task changes the neural processing of incentive cues that code expected monetary outcomes. We used a novel auditory version of the MID task, where participants responded to acoustic cues that coded expected monetary losses. To investigate task-induced brain plasticity, we presented incentive cues as deviants during passive oddball tasks before and after two sessions of the MID task. During the oddball task, we recorded the mismatch-related negativity (MMN) as an index of cortical plasticity. We found that two sessions of the MID task evoked a significant enhancement of MMN for incentive cues that predicted large monetary losses, specifically when monetary cue discrimination was essential for maximising monetary outcomes. The task-induced plasticity correlated with the learning-related neural activity recorded during the MID task. Thus, our results confirm that the processing of (loss)incentive auditory cues is dynamically modulated by previously learned monetary outcomes.

Effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on FRN and P2 during the performance of auditory monetary incentive delay task

“…In the previous MID experiment which was dedicated to study brain plasticity associated with anticipating losses in different context, we found that FRN differed as a results of magnitude of losses: dFRN as a difference between FRN in response to smaller and larger losses varied in different trial types: the dFRN was negative in the LL-trials and positive in the HL-and WL-trials. Our results indicate that in the context of losses, FRN is modulated by reference points and expectations (Gorin et al, 2020). Moreover, we found a correlation of the sensory auditory plasticity manifested in the MMN component with the reward-processing manifested in teh fRN.…”

“…Earlier findings from our project reveal that the FRN magnitude is sensitive to both probability and size of the reward in the win-oriented version of the task and to the size of the money loss in the MID version of the task, which was aimed at preventing such loss (Krugliakova et al, 2018;Gorin et al, 2020).…”

“…Feedback-related negativity (FRN) is considered as a main candidate neurophysiological correlate of the RPE signal, observed in both the money loss and gain domains (Walsh and Anderson, 2012; Sambrook and Goslin, 2014). Earlier findings from our project reveal that the FRN magnitude is sensitive to both probability and size of the reward in the win-oriented version of the task and to the size of the money loss in the MID version of the task, which was aimed at preventing such loss (Krugliakova et al, 2018; Gorin et al, 2020).…”

“…Moreover, we found a correlation of the sensory auditory plasticity manifested in the MMN component with the reward-processing manifested in teh fRN. In a consecutive study (Gorin et al, 2020, we used cathodal tDCS to test whether medial prefrontal cortex known to drive the generation of FRN in the context specific manner, i.e. will the effect of the cathodal tDCS which is known to drive an inhibitory response will be different depending on the context of the losses: widely varying losses vs. small losses vs. big losses.…”

“…As a result of the MID loss-avoidance task, the association between previously neutral auditory stimuli and a particular loss size led to plastic changes in the auditory cortex, reflected in an increase in mismatch negativity (MMN), a component of the auditory evoked potentials observed during the oddball task (Garrido et al, 2008;Näätänen et al, 2004). Furthermore, it was found that, at the individual level, such changes in the amplitude of the MMN correlate with the sensitivity of the FRN component to the magnitude of the loss (Krugliakova et al, 2019;Gorin et al, 2020). This correlation, however, cannot directly indicate a causal relationship between sensory cortex plasticity and the activity of feedback-processing areas.…”