The left dorsal striatum is involved in the processing of neutral feedback

Abstract

In experimental settings, feedback is mostly used to inform about the correctness of a participant's response. Such feedback, however, also provides the information that a response was registered, which is highly significant in any dialog situation. The present functional MRI study investigated the involvement of brain areas in the processing of neutral, verbal feedback. We used an auditory discrimination task with verbal feedback, which immediately informed the participants that their response was registered. We found an increased activation in the left dorsal striatum compared with temporally uncorrelated feedback and the no-feedback condition. Several studies using evaluative feedback suggest that this area participates in reward processing. The present result suggests that it may already be involved in more basic aspects of feedback processing.