Insight into the processes of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ learners
… their detailed studies also found a difference in ERNs in “positive” and “negative” learners. The former are people who perform better at choosing the correct response than avoiding the wrong one, and the latter are those who learn better to avoid incorrect responses. The negative learners, they found, showed larger ERNs, suggesting that “these individuals are more affected by, and therefore learn more from, their errors. This notion makes the strong prediction that the feedback negativity should also be relatively larger in these participants to negative compared with positive feedback, which could potentially reflect the neural mechanism causing them to be more sensitive to their mistakes.”
Is there two different paths for avoiding something and selecting something? It seems that there are two different mechanism for processing negative and positive experiences. And it seems that it is (at least) due to reinforcement signal generator.
They explained that “In other words, positive reinforcement learners appear to have experienced greater conflict when choosing between two stimuli that were each previously associated with positive (compared with negative) feedback, whereas negative reinforcement learners may have experienced greater conflict when choosing among negative stimuli.”
(maybe) People do some kind of ordering evaluation instead of mere value comparison for their RL-based decisions. And/Or people have different sensitivity in different region of values, i.e. negative values are stored in coarser details comparing with positive values for some people and vice versa.