The neural correlates of outcome monitoring and false feedback detection in choice blindness: a fMRI study

Choice blindness refers to the puzzling observation that people tend to be unaware of mismatches between their intention and outcome and to confabulate reasons for choices they never made. Little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms behind choice blindness, driving people’s acceptance or rejection of false feedback on their own choice. Here we report the results of the first event-related fMRI study on false feedback detection in choice blindness. Detected manipulations were associated with activity in reward monitoring areas (midbrain, basal ganglia, insula, medial prefrontal cortex), correlates of sensory predictions and the sense of agency (superior temporal sulcus, supplementary motor area, angular gyrus, precuneus) as well as a frontoparietal network associated with executive functions and reasoning (rostral prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal and angular gyrus). Failure to detect false feedback was not characterised by any positive activation, but a host of deactivations in more posterior/occipital regions (lingual, fusiform, parahippocampal gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex). We interpret these findings within a recent framework suggesting that feedback attribution in choice blindness relies on automatic monitoring mechanisms generating error signals, which are then integrated and interpreted by reasoning and executive systems.