RESEARCH ARTICLE
Putamen Activation Represents an Intrinsic Positive Prediction Error Signal for Visual Search in Repeated Configurations
Susanne Sommer1, Stefan Pollmann1, 2, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 126
Last Page: 138
Publisher ID: TONIJ-10-126
DOI: 10.2174/1874440001610010126
Article History:
Received Date: 02/9/2016Revision Received Date: 29/9/2016
Acceptance Date: 30/09/2016
Electronic publication date: 31/10/2016
Collection year: 2016

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
We investigated fMRI responses to visual search targets appearing at locations that were predicted by the search context. Based on previous work in visual category learning we expected an intrinsic reward prediction error signal in the putamen whenever the target appeared at a location that was predicted with some degree of uncertainty. Comparing target appearance at locations predicted with 50% probability to either locations predicted with 100% probability or unpredicted locations, increased activation was observed in left posterior putamen and adjacent left posterior insula. Thus, our hypothesis of an intrinsic prediction error-like signal was confirmed. This extends the observation of intrinsic prediction error-like signals, driven by intrinsic rather than extrinsic reward, to memory-driven visual search.