Individual differences in error tolerance in humans: Neurophysiological evidences

When interacting in error-prone environments, humans display different tolerances to changing their decisions when faced with erroneous feedback information. Here, we investigated whether these individual differences in error tolerance (ET) were reflected in neurophysiological mechanisms indexing specific motivational states related to feedback monitoring. To explore differences in ET, we examined the performance of 80 participants in a probabilistic reversal-learning task. We then compared event-related brain responses (ERPs) of two extreme groups of participants (High ET and Low ET), which showed radical differences in their propensity to maintain newly learned rules after receiving spurious negative feedback. We observed that High ET participants showed reduced anticipatory activity prior to the presentation of incoming feedback, informing them of the correctness of their performance. This was evidenced by measuring the amplitude of the stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN), an ERP component indexing attention and motivational engagement of incoming informative feedback. Postfeedback processing ERP components (the so-called Feedback-Related Negativity and the P300) also showed reduced amplitude in this group (High ET). The general decreased responsiveness of the High ET group to external feedback suggests a higher proneness to favor internal(rule)-based strategies, reducing attention to external cues and the consequent impact of negative evaluations on decision making. We believe that the present findings support the existence of specific cognitive and motivational processes underlying individual differences on error-tolerance among humans, contributing to the ongoing research focused on understanding the mental processes behind human fallibility in error-prone scenarios.