Losing Money Causes Plastic Changes in the Brain

Summary: Financial losses evoke neuroplasticity alterations to the auditory cortex, a new study reports.

Source: HSE

Researchers at the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have shown experimentally that economic activity can actively change the brain. Signals that predict regular financial losses evoke plastic changes in the cortex. Therefore, these signals are processed by the brain more meticulously, which helps to identify such situations more accurately. The article was published in Scientific Reports.

The sight of an envelope from the tax authority, a falling currency rate, or a sad face of your chief accountant can mean impending financial troubles. How does the brain learn to recognize situations like this? Do these situations cause changes in brain function? These questions were studied by cognitive neuroscientists at HSE University using a popular economic game – the monetary incentive delay task (MID Task).

The MID Task requires that a person respond quickly to a signal that signals an opportunity to receive a reward or avoid a loss. It also allows you to divide brain mechanisms reward processing into separate stages: expectation of reward and learning.

‘We hypothesized that, like the plastic changes in the brain during the learning of a second language or playing a musical instrument, similar neuroplastic changes occur for certain signals that are associated with important economic outcomes. For example, the sound of a slot machine can for a long time be associated with a big win or loss while visiting a casino, which causes a particularly strong reaction in our brain in the future,’ explains Anna Shestakova, director of HSE University’s Centre for Cognition & Decision Making.

The subjects (29 people) took part in an economic game in which sound signals predicted losses of various sizes: the participants could lose between one and fifty-one monetary units in each round of the game. Participants had to quickly and accurately respond to audio signals to avoid monetary losses.

The study showed that participating in such a game leads to plastic changes in the auditory cortex of the brain, which begins to more accurately distinguish sounds that are associated with large financial losses. Moreover, scientists have demonstrated a link of this plastic change of the brain with the ‘learning signal’ generated by the human brain during performance of the MID Task. Subjects with a more pronounced neural ‘learning signal’ demonstrated stronger plastic changes in the nervous system.

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The study showed that participating in such a game leads to plastic changes in the auditory cortex of the brain, which begins to more accurately distinguish sounds that are associated with large financial losses. Image is in the public domain

The results of the experiment suggest that life’s economic experience can lead to changes in the brain, which alters how external signals are perceived. Interestingly, the brain learns to identify important economic signals automatically. Moreover, scientists have shown precisely how this rewiring of the brain occurs and have demonstrated the role of individual differences in brain learning systems using the neurotransmitter dopamine.

‘This is the first experimental evidence to show that economic activity can actively change the brain,’ said Aleksey Gorin, a graduate student at HSE University and one of the authors of the study. ‘Signals leading to financial losses evoke rather fast neuroplastic changes. Therefore, they are identified by the brain automatically, and do not require voluntary attention,’ he said.

About this brain plasticity research news

Source: HSE
Contact: Liudmila Mezentseva – HSE
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.
Cortical plasticity elicited by acoustically cued monetary losses: an ERP study” by Aleksei Gorin, Elena Krugliakova, Vadim Nikulin, Aleksandra Kuznetsova, Victoria Moiseeva, Vasily Klucharev & Anna Shestakova. Scientific Reports


Abstract

Cortical plasticity elicited by acoustically cued monetary losses: an ERP study

Both human and animal studies have demonstrated remarkable findings of experience-induced plasticity in the cortex. Here, we investigated whether the widely used monetary incentive delay (MID) task changes the neural processing of incentive cues that code expected monetary outcomes. We used a novel auditory version of the MID task, where participants responded to acoustic cues that coded expected monetary losses. To investigate task-induced brain plasticity, we presented incentive cues as deviants during passive oddball tasks before and after two sessions of the MID task. During the oddball task, we recorded the mismatch-related negativity (MMN) as an index of cortical plasticity. We found that two sessions of the MID task evoked a significant enhancement of MMN for incentive cues that predicted large monetary losses, specifically when monetary cue discrimination was essential for maximising monetary outcomes. The task-induced plasticity correlated with the learning-related neural activity recorded during the MID task. Thus, our results confirm that the processing of (loss)incentive auditory cues is dynamically modulated by previously learned monetary outcomes.

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