Background: Feedback evaluation of actions and error response detection are critical for optimizing behavioral adaptation. Oxytocin can facilitate learning following social feedback but whether its effects vary as a function of feedback valence remains unclear.
Aims: The present study aimed to investigate whether oxytocin would influence responses to positive and negative feedback differentially or equivalently.
Methods: The present study employed a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled within-subject design to investigate whether intranasal oxytocin (24 IU) influenced behavioral and evoked electrophysiological potential responses to positive or negative feedback in a probabilistic learning task.
Results: Results showed that oxytocin facilitated learning and this effect was maintained in the absence of feedback. Using novel stimulus pairings, we found that oxytocin abolished bias towards learning more from negative feedback under placebo by increasing accuracy for positively reinforced stimuli. Oxytocin also decreased the feedback-related negativity difference (negative minus positive feedback) during learning, further suggesting that it rendered the evaluation of positive and negative feedback more equivalent. Additionally, post-learning oxytocin attenuated error-related negativity amplitudes but increased the late error positivity, suggesting that it may lower conflict detection between actual errors and expected correct responses at an early stage of processing but at a later stage increase error awareness and motivation for avoiding them.
Conclusions: Oxytocin facilitates learning and subsequent performance by rendering the impact of positive relative to negative feedback more equivalent and also by reducing conflict detection and increasing error awareness, which may be beneficial for behavioral adaption.
Keywords: Oxytocin; cognitive conflict; error awareness; feedback; learning.