Effects of social context and predictive relevance on action outcome monitoring

Outcome monitoring is crucial for subsequent adjustments in behavior and is associated with a specific electrophysiological response, the feedback-related negativity (FRN). Besides feedback generated by one’s own action, the performance of others may also be relevant for oneself, and the observation of outcomes for others’ actions elicits an observer FRN (oFRN). To test how these components are influenced by social setting and predictive value of feedback information, we compared event-related potentials, as well as their topographies and neural generators, for performance feedback generated by oneself and others in a cooperative versus competitive context. Our results show that (1) the predictive relevance of outcomes is crucial to elicit an FRN in both players and observers, (2) cooperation increases FRN and P300 amplitudes, especially in individuals with high traits of perspective taking, and (3) contrary to previous findings on gambling outcomes, oFRN components are generated for both cooperating and competing observers, but with smaller amplitudes in the latter. Neural source estimation revealed medial prefrontal activity for both FRN and oFRN, but with additional generators for the oFRN in the dorsolateral and ventral prefrontal cortex, as well as the temporoparietal junction. We conclude that the latter set of brain regions could mediate social influences on action monitoring by representing agency and social relevance of outcomes and are, therefore, recruited in addition to shared prediction error signals generated in medial frontal areas during action outcome observation.