Figure 1.

Social Evaluation Learning task. An example of two trials from a self-referential block, in which the computer character is called Sam and the participant is learning what Sam thinks of them. After viewing a fixation cross, the participant was presented with a positive and negative word pair and instructed to choose the word which best corresponded with what Sam thought about them. They then received feedback about whether their choice was correct (green tick) or incorrect (red cross). Participants used trial and error to learn whether the character liked or disliked them over 20 trials. In the first trial shown here, the participant selected the positive word, which was correct. In the second trial, the participant chose the negative word, which was incorrect. Both of these trials show true (as opposed to misleading) feedback. To prevent ceiling effects, feedback contingency was set at 80%, so that ‘correct’ responses received an 8:2 ratio of positive to negative feedback and ‘incorrect’ responses received an 8:2 ratio of negative to positive feedback.