Motivational Go/NoGo learning task and performance.

(a) In each trial, a cue appears on screen and response-dependent feedback follows. By trial and error, subjects should learn to press left or right (Go cues) and withhold responding (NoGo cues) during cue presentation. Feedback is probabilistic; correct responses are followed by rewards for “win” cues and neutral outcomes for “avoid” cues 80% of the time and by neutral outcomes for “win” cues and punishments for “avoid” cues otherwise. For incorrect responses, these probabilities are reversed. Rewards and punishments are visualized by money falling in and out of a basket, respectively. Image adapted from [11]. (b) Each cue has only one correct response: Go left, Go right, or NoGo. In total, there are eight different cues over which cue valence (“win” versus “avoid”) is orthogonal to the required action (Go versus NoGo). The motivationally incongruent cues, for which the Pavlovian response tendencies are opposite to the instrumental requirements, are marked in gray. (c) Average trial-by-trial behavior (shaded areas indicate the standard error of the mean) collapsed over cues of the same category. Subjects (N = 34) decrease incorrect Go responses (left: NoGo cues; right: Go cues) and increase correct Go responses over trials (right), illustrative of task learning. Note that only one of the Go responses (Go left/Go right) was considered correct for the Go cues, whereas all Go responses were incorrect for the NoGo cues. Notably, the initial dip in Go responses for the Go-to-Avoid cues suggests that cue valence affects Go responding once the cue valence is known, i.e., once punishment has been experienced. (d) Overall, subjects make significantly more Go responses for Go than NoGo cues. Orthogonal to the action requirements, subjects make more correct and incorrect Go responses for the “win” than “avoid” cues, which we refer to as the motivational bias. Error bars represent the standard error of the difference. ***p http://hdl.handle.net/11633/di.dccn.DSC_3017033.03_624.