A chronometric relationship between circuits underlying learning and error monitoring in the basal ganglia and...

Healthy individuals readily adjust their behavior in response to errors usinglearning mechanisms. This raises the question of how error-related neuralmechanisms underlie the learning process and its progress. In this study, 21healthy participants performed a challenging functional magnetic resonanceimaging (fMRI) task to answer this question. We assessed the evolution oferror-related neural response as a function of learning progress. We tested thehypothesis that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula,key regions of the error monitoring neural circuitry, reflect both theperformance of an action and its improvement. Given the nature oftrial-and-error learning, we also expected an involvement of the striatum,particularly the putamen. We found that error-related neural activity (in thedACC and anterior insula) was similar following correct responses and errors inan initial learning period. However, as learning progressed, the activitycontinuously decreased in response to correct events and increased after errors.In opposition, during the initial learning phase, the putamen activity wasmodulated by errors, but, as it progressed, this region became unaffected byresponse outcomes. In sum, our study provides neural evidence for an interactionbetween the mechanisms underlying error monitoring and learning, contributing toclarifying how error-related neural responses evolve with learning.