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.

项目概要 该应用程序旨在通过研究社会等级制度对参与评估和学习的基本神经和认知过程的影响，了解如何将时间动态信息纳入社会决策中。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发生波动，从而改变社会环境。等级制度，或者说个体根据权力和地位的组织，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又可以表现出短暂性质的社会信息。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存在于从自闭症到精神分裂症的精神病理学中，并且这种缺陷可能是由于适应不良的监测和随时间变化的社会特征（例如等级制度）的整合而产生的。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医生或教师等专业人士或向其学习的决定，但情境背景可以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）。等级制度的这些稳定和短暂特征之间的交叉点尤其重要，因为权力动态可能涉及不同或重叠的心理过程。例如，如果患者认为医疗保健提供者具有相似的社会地位，他们可能会更主动地建议替代疗法。这些过程可能会根据隐含目标进一步调整不同类型的决策。如果决策中涉及的神经和认知过程仅部分重叠，那么隶属目标和竞争目标可能会受到等级制度的分离影响。虽然传统的心理学实验使用匿名或未知的伙伴（这提供了重要的实验控制）来研究人类的社会决策，但这种局限性与现实世界的场景无关，在现实世界的场景中，人类获取与他们互动的人的动态信息。研究这些决策所涉及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、前额叶皮层和颞顶交界区等大脑区域的计算支持奖励最大化而不是成本、心智化和学习能力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始终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，了解社会等级与学习和决策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。通过在神经和认知层面考虑社会背景的时间要素，对奖励评估和​​学习与社会过程等心理结构之间相互作用的检查实现并扩展了研究领域标准（RDoC）计划的目标。该提案的目标 1 将研究如何将稳定和短暂的社会信息整合到具有归属目标的决策中。在这里，参与者将做出关于在分配游戏中分享奖励的决定。将通过结合功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和计算模型来测试具体假设，以测试当提供有关他人在稳定和瞬态领域的社会地位和权力的信息时，神经表征是否能够区分自己和他人之间代价高昂的奖励分享。目标 2 将把这些机制扩展到竞争性的社会学习环境中。在功能磁共振成像期间，参与者将执行一项任务，允许评估从对手的决策中学习的复杂信念。假设将评估支持社会学习的大脑机制是否取决于竞争对手的感知地位和权力。在完成目标 1 中的实验的同一参与者中研究这些过程将进一步允许比较分层身份表示。具体测试将评估人类是否形成根据不同维度的上下文而变化的潜在表征：亲和与竞争目标、稳定的等级位置和短暂的等级位置。最后，目标 3 将研究这些神经表征如何与日常社交互动以及社会不平等的个人经历相关。当与感知等级模糊或与自己不同的其他人互动时，人类倾向于采用情绪调节策略。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，在这里我们将确定社会等级的神经表征是否与日常生活中与社会等级相关的情绪调节以及对社会等级不同的人的意图进行心智化的能力有关。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，从而减轻精神病理学中的社会决策缺陷。总体而言，该提案旨在结合候选人在功能神经影像学和经济决策方面的专业知识，为候选人做好专注于社会决策神经机制的独立研究职业的准备。