A second source of self-efficacy is previous experience with a given task. If we have performed well in the past, we expect that we will also succeed in the future. A recent study investigated how humans learn about their past performance over the course of many trials (Wittmann et al., 2016). On every trial, subjects performed a short reaction-time based task and received parametric performance feedback for their own and another person’s performance. Subjects were therefore able to build up a representation of their own ability in the task over time. Using trial-by-trial self-ratings, subjects indicated their expectation of how well they would perform on subsequent trials of the task. The authors found that subjects based their expectation of future success on their history of past performance. This was reflected in the BOLD signal in pgACC, that scaled with how good one’s own task performance was in the past; higher levels of past performance were accompanied by higher BOLD activity in pgACC. In addition, the relationship between pgACC signal and past performance history was strongest in subjects who relied most
