Intermittent Absence of Control during Reinforcement Learning Interferes with Pavlovian Bias in Action Selection
Intermittent Absence of Control during Reinforcement Learning Interferes with Pavlovian Bias in Action Selection
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DOI：
10.1162/jocn_a_01515
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发表时间：
2020-04-01
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Mittner, Matthias
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Csifcsak, Gabor;Melsaeter, Eirik;Mittner, Matthias
控制奖惩事件发生的能力对我们的福祉至关重要。优化绩效的两种方法是遵循巴甫洛夫式的偏向等启发式方法，以接近回报和避免损失，或者更多地依赖于缓慢积累的刺激-行动关联。虽然对结果的控制减少与获得性无助相关的临床条件下的次优决策有关，但环境的不可控性与不同反应策略之间的仲裁有多大关系尚不清楚。这项研究直接测试了一种旨在诱导健康成年人习得性无助的行为操作(在强化学习任务中对反馈的间歇性失控)是否会调节健康成年人的巴甫洛夫偏见的大小和认知控制(额叶中线theta功率)的神经生理学特征。通过对行为数据和脑电信号的统计分析和计算建模，我们发现，颈锁组大鼠额叶theta活动受到更强的巴甫洛夫影响和改变。然而，在重新获得控制的实验区中，这些效应并没有伴随着成绩的下降，这表明我们的行为操纵不足以导致无助感和对任务要求的应对能力受损。我们的结论是，工具性选择和奖惩之间的偶然性水平调节了基于价值的决策过程中的巴甫洛夫偏差，可能是通过干扰认知控制的实施。这些发现可能会对理解各种精神疾病中产生无助的机制有所帮助。
The ability to control the occurrence of rewarding and punishing events is crucial for our well-being. Two ways to optimize performance are to follow heuristics like Pavlovian biases to approach reward and avoid loss or to rely more on slowly accumulated stimulus-action associations. Although reduced control over outcomes has been linked to suboptimal decision-making in clinical conditions associated with learned helplessness, it is unclear how uncontrollability of the environment is related to the arbitration between different response strategies. This study directly tested whether a behavioral manipulation designed to induce learned helplessness in healthy adults (intermittent loss of control over feedback in a reinforcement learning task; "yoking") would modulate the magnitude of Pavlovian bias and the neurophysiological signature of cognitive control (frontal midline theta power) in healthy adults. Using statistical analysis and computational modeling of behavioral data and electroencephalographic signals, we found stronger Pavlovian influences and alterations in frontal theta activity in the yoked group. However, these effects were not accompanied by reduced performance in experimental blocks with regained control, indicating that our behavioral manipulation was not potent enough for inducing helplessness and impaired coping ability with task demands. We conclude that the level of contingency between instrumental choices and rewards/punishments modulates Pavlovian bias during value-based decision-making, probably via interfering with the implementation of cognitive control. These findings might have implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying helplessness in various psychiatric conditions.