It has been suggested that stimulus novelty itself can be rewarding and recent evidence suggests that novelty processing and reward processing share common neural mechanisms. For feedback processing, this can be beneficial as well as detrimental: If novelty lends a rewarding characteristic to a stimulus, then this should particularly decrease the impact of negative feedback. The present study investigated whether such an effect of feedback novelty on feedback processing is reflected in electrophysiological markers of reinforcement learning (feedback-related negativity, FRN) and feedback processing (feedback-P300) in a simple decision-making task. In this task, participants had to chose between two stimuli in a learning trial followed by a novel or a familiar feedback stimulus. Learning from feedback allowed them to optimize their payoff in a later test trial. As expected, we found that the FRN effect, i.e. the difference between the FRN amplitudes after negative and positive feedback, was reduced for novel compared to familiar feedback stimuli. In addition, the amplitude of the feedback-P300 was decreased by feedback novelty, both for the anterior P3a and the posterior P3b. Together, these results indicate that feedback novelty can affect feedback processing as reflected by feedback-related brain activity.

有人认为，刺激新颖性本身就可以带来回报，最近的证据表明，新颖性处理和奖励处理具有共同的神经机制。对于反馈处理来说，这可能是有益的，也可能是有害的：如果新颖性给刺激带来了有益的特征，那么这应该特别减少负面反馈的影响。本研究调查了反馈新颖性对反馈处理的这种影响是否反映在简单决策任务中强化学习（反馈相关负性，FRN）和反馈处理（反馈-P300）的电生理标记中。在这项任务中，参与者必须在学习试验中的两种刺激之间进行选择，然后选择一种新颖的或熟悉的反馈刺激。从反馈中学习使他们能够在以后的测试中优化他们的回报。正如预期的那样，我们发现与熟悉的反馈刺激相比，新颖的 FRN 效应（即负反馈和正反馈后 FRN 幅度之间的差异）减小了。此外，前 P3a 和后 P3b 的反馈 P300 幅度均因反馈新颖性而降低。总之，这些结果表明，反馈新颖性可以影响反馈处理，如反馈相关的大脑活动所反映的那样。