Dorsal posterior cingulate cortex responds to negative feedback information supporting learning and relearning of response policies

Abstract Many challenges in life come without explicit instructions. Instead, humans need to test, select, and adapt their behavioral responses based on feedback from the environment. While reward-centric accounts of feedback processing primarily stress the reinforcing aspect of positive feedback, feedback’s central function from an information-processing perspective is to offer an opportunity to correct errors, thus putting a greater emphasis on the informational content of negative feedback. Independent of its potential rewarding value, the informational value of performance feedback has recently been suggested to be neurophysiologically encoded in the dorsal portion of the posterior cingulate cortex (dPCC). To further test this association, we investigated multidimensional categorization and reversal learning by comparing negative and positive feedback in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. Negative feedback, compared with positive feedback, increased activation in the dPCC as well as in brain regions typically involved in error processing. Only in the dPCC, subarea d23, this effect was significantly enhanced in relearning, where negative feedback signaled the need to shift away from a previously established response policy. Together with previous findings, this result contributes to a more fine-grained functional parcellation of PCC subregions and supports the dPCC’s involvement in the adaptation to behaviorally relevant information from the environment.