Neural mechanisms of stable and transient hierarchy on social decision making

稳定和瞬态层次结构对社会决策的神经机制

• 批准号: 10678818
• 负责人: Jaime Jorge Fernando Castrellon
• 金额: $ 8.61万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-07-01 至 2027-05-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10678818
• 关键词: Affect; Affective; Age; Alternative Therapies; Animals; Anterior; Behavior; Behavioral; Belief; Brain; Brain region; Characteristics; Child; Clinical; Cognitive; Communities; Complex; Computer Models; Corpus striatum structure; Cost Sharing; Cues; Data; Decision Making; Diagnostic; Dimensions; Disease; Dopamine; Economics; Elements; Emotions; Employee; Environment; Evaluation; Exhibits; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Future; Gender; Goals; Health Personnel; Hospitals; Human; Individual; Insula of Reil; Intervention; Learning; Life; Link; MRI Scans; Medical; Mental Processes; Monitor; Multivariate Analysis; Occupations; Outcome; Parents; Participant; Patients; Pattern; Perception; Performance at work; Persons; Positioning Attribute; Prefrontal Cortex; Process; Psychopathology; Research; Rewards; Role; Sampling; Schizophrenia; Shapes; Social Behavior; Social Dominance; Social Environment; Social Functioning; Social Hierarchy; Social Interaction; Social Power; Social Processes; Social status; Societies; Socioeconomic Status; Source; System; Testing; Time; Trust; Update; Work; Workplace; autism spectrum disorder; career; cognitive process; competitive environment; cost; design; emotion regulation; experience; experimental study; flexibility; insight; learning ability; mentalization; neural; neural circuit; neural patterning; neuroimaging; neuromechanism; preference; psychologic; social; social deficits; social disparities; social influence; social learning; teacher; trait

Project Summary This application seeks to understand how temporally-dynamic information is incorporated into social decisions by investigating the influence of social hierarchy on basic neural and cognitive processes engaged in valuation and learning. While some kinds of social information are stable, others can fluctuate in a way that can shift a social context. Hierarchy, or the organization of individuals according to power and status, is a common feature of most social animal species including humans and is a kind of social information that can exhibit both stable and transient qualities. Knowing a person’s place in society may shape an individual’s decisions to trust or learn from them. Critically, deficits in social decisions, broadly, are observed in psychopathologies ranging from autism to schizophrenia and potentially, such deficits might arise from maladaptive monitoring and integration of time-varying social features such as hierarchy. While stable hierarchical identities like socioeconomic status or gender could influence a person’s decision to trust or learn from professionals like medical doctors or teachers, situational contexts can further transiently increase or decrease perceived differences in power or status (e.g., being at a hospital or in a classroom). The intersection between these stable and transient features of hierarchy are especially important because power dynamics may engage distinct or overlapping mental processes. For instance, patients might be more proactive in suggesting alternative therapies if they perceive healthcare providers to be of similar social status. These processes might further modulate different kinds of decisions depending on implicit goals. Affiliative and competitive goals might be under dissociable influence of hierarchy if the neural and cognitive processes involved in the decisions only partially overlap. While traditional psychological experiments have investigated human social decisions using anonymous or unknown partners (which offers important experimental control), this limitation is detached from real-world scenarios in which humans acquire dynamic information about the people with whom they are interacting. Studying the neural mechanisms involved in these decisions can provide information about the basic cognitive processes that contribute to maladaptive decision making. Specifically, computations in brain regions like the striatum, prefrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction supporting reward maximization over costs, mentalizing, and learning abilities are important for interactions with others. Notably, the functional roles of these regions are consistently implicated in clinical disorders like schizophrenia and autism, which share common social behavior deficits. Therefore, understanding the brain mechanisms involved in the integration of social hierarchy with learning and decision making can provide transdiagnostic insight about social behavior. This examination of interactions between psychological constructs like reward valuation and learning with social processes achieves and extends the goals of the Research Domains Criteria (RDoC) Initiative by considering the temporal elements of social context at the neural and cognitive levels. Aim 1 of this proposal will investigate how stable and transient social information is integrated in decisions with affiliative goals. Here, participants will make decisions about sharing rewards in a distribution game. Specific hypotheses will be tested by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational modelling to test whether neural representations can distinguish costly sharing of rewards between oneself and others when information is provided about others’ social status and power in both stable and transient domains. Aim 2 will extend these mechanisms to a competitive social learning context. During fMRI, participants will perform a task that permits evaluation of complex belief learning from decisions made by opponents. Hypotheses will evaluate whether brain mechanisms supporting social learning depend on competitors’ perceived status and power. Studying these processes in the same participants who complete the experiment in Aim 1 will further allow comparison of hierarchical identity representation. Specific test will evaluate whether humans form latent representations that change depending on the context across different dimensions: affiliative versus competitive goals, stable hierarchy position, and transient hierarchy position. Finally, Aim 3 will investigate how these neural representations relate to daily social interactions and personal experiences with social inequality. When interacting with others whose perceived hierarchy is either ambiguous or different than one’s own, humans tend to deploy emotion regulation strategies. Deficits in emotion regulation abilities, however, are symptomatic of a range of psychopathologies. Therefore, here we will identify whether neural representations of social hierarchy are related to daily life social-hierarchy related emotion regulation and abilities to mentalize the intentions of people who vary in social hierarchy. The correspondence of brain mechanisms to real-world decisions outside of the lab can inform potential future interventions that alleviate social decision-making deficits in psychopathology. Overall, this proposal has been designed to combine the candidate’s expertise in functional neuroimaging and economic decision making to prepare the candidate for an independent research career focused on neural mechanisms of social decision making.

项目摘要 本申请旨在了解如何将时间动态信息纳入社会决策，通过调查社会等级对参与评估和学习的基本神经和认知过程的影响。虽然某些类型的社会信息是稳定的，但其他类型的信息可能会以改变社会背景的方式波动。等级制度，或根据权力和地位对个体进行组织，是包括人类在内的大多数社会性动物物种的共同特征，是一种既可以表现出稳定性又可以表现出短暂性的社会信息。了解一个人在社会中的地位可能会影响一个人信任他们或向他们学习的决定。重要的是，社会决策的缺陷，广泛地说，在精神病理学中观察到从自闭症到精神分裂症，潜在地，这种缺陷可能是由于适应不良的监测和整合时变的社会特征，如层次结构。虽然社会经济地位或性别等稳定的等级身份可能会影响一个人信任或向医生或教师等专业人士学习的决定，但情境背景可能会进一步暂时增加或减少权力或地位的感知差异（例如，在医院或教室里）。这些稳定和短暂的等级特征之间的交叉点尤为重要，因为权力动态可能涉及不同或重叠的心理过程。例如，如果患者认为医疗服务提供者具有类似的社会地位，他们可能会更积极地建议替代疗法。这些过程可能会根据隐含的目标进一步调整不同类型的决策。如果参与决策的神经和认知过程只有部分重叠，则附属目标和竞争目标可能受到层级的可分离影响。虽然传统的心理学实验已经研究了使用匿名或未知的合作伙伴（这提供了重要的实验控制）的人类社会决策，但这种限制与现实世界的场景无关，在现实世界中，人类获取有关他们与之互动的人的动态信息。研究参与这些决策的神经机制可以提供有关导致适应不良决策的基本认知过程的信息。具体来说，纹状体、前额叶皮层和颞顶叶交界处等支持奖励最大化而非成本、心智化和学习能力的大脑区域的计算对于与他人的互动非常重要。值得注意的是，这些区域的功能作用一直与精神分裂症和自闭症等临床疾病有关，这些疾病具有共同的社会行为缺陷。因此，理解社会等级与学习和决策的整合所涉及的大脑机制可以提供关于社会行为的跨诊断见解。这种心理结构之间的相互作用，如奖励评估和学习与社会过程的检查实现和扩展的研究领域标准（RDoC）倡议的目标，考虑在神经和认知水平的社会背景的时间元素。本提案的目标1将研究稳定和短暂的社会信息如何整合在具有从属目标的决策中。在这里，参与者将决定在分配游戏中分享奖励。具体的假设将通过结合功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）和计算模型来测试，以测试神经表征是否可以区分自己和他人之间的代价高昂的奖励分享时，提供有关他人的社会地位和权力在稳定和短暂的域。目标2将把这些机制扩展到竞争性的社会学习环境。在功能磁共振成像过程中，参与者将执行一项任务，该任务允许评估从对手做出的决定中学习的复杂信念。假设将评估支持社会学习的大脑机制是否取决于竞争者的感知地位和权力。在完成目标1中实验的同一批参与者中研究这些过程，将进一步允许对分层身份表征进行比较。具体的测试将评估人类是否形成了根据不同维度的背景而变化的潜在表征：亲和与竞争目标，稳定的层次位置和短暂的层次位置。最后，目标3将研究这些神经表征如何与日常社会互动和社会不平等的个人经历相关。当与其他人互动时，他们的感知等级要么模糊不清，要么不同于自己，人类倾向于部署情绪调节策略。然而，情绪调节能力的缺陷是一系列精神病理学的症状。因此，在这里，我们将确定是否社会等级的神经表征与日常生活社会等级相关的情绪调节和心智化的人谁在社会等级不同的意图的能力。大脑机制与实验室外现实世界决策的对应关系可以为未来潜在的干预措施提供信息，以减轻精神病理学中的社会决策缺陷。总的来说，这项建议的目的是联合收割机结合候选人的专业知识，在功能性神经成像和经济决策，准备候选人的独立研究生涯集中在神经机制的社会决策。