The role of serotonin in performance monitoring and cognitive control

Performance monitoring provides means to flexibly adjust behavior to changing demands. This requires an evaluation of performance and feedback, and its integration into behavioral control. As a central neuromodulator, serotonin has been implicated in many aspects of this feedback loop from error monitoring to inhibitory processes and decision-making. Studies in humans rarely found that serotonergic manipulations change error detection. In contrast, serotonin does appear to modulate how action errors relate to subsequent behavioral inhibition. This is especially true when initiation of new actions, rather than action cancellation, is investigated, suggesting that serotonin influences decision formation rather than action execution. In line with this, serotonergic involvement in shielding motivated behavior from alternative paths of actions has been demonstrated in animal studies. Therefore, a role for serotonin in performance monitoring may be to confer the value and especially the costs of future actions.