Neural mechanisms of stable and transient hierarchy on social decision making

项目摘要 这项应用试图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，来理解时间动态信息是如何被纳入社会决策的。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一种可以改变社会背景的方式波动。等级，即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动物物种的共同特征，是一种既可以表现出稳定性也可以表现出暂时性的社会信息。了解一个人在社会中的位置可能会塑造一个人的决定，即信任他们或向他们学习。关键的是，从自闭症到精神分裂症的各种精神疾病中都能观察到社会决策的缺陷，潜在地，这种缺陷可能是由于不适应的监测和对时变的社会特征的整合，如等级制度。稳定的等级身份，如社会经济地位或性别，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，而情景环境可能会进一步短暂地增加或减少在权力或地位方面的感知差异(例如，在医院或在课堂上)。这些稳定和短暂的等级特征之间的交集尤其重要，因为权力动态可能涉及截然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的社会地位相似，他们可能会更主动地建议替代疗法。根据隐含的目标，这些过程可能会进一步调整不同类型的决定。如果决策中涉及的神经和认知过程只有部分重叠，附属目标和竞争性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研究的是使用匿名或不知名的伴侣(这提供了重要的实验控制)来研究人类的社会决策，但这种限制与人类获取关于与他们互动的人的动态信息的真实世界场景是分开的。研究这些决策涉及的神经机制可以提供有关导致不适应决策的基本认知过程的信息。具体地说，纹状体、前额叶皮质和颞顶交界处等大脑区域的计算支持回报最大化，而不是成本、意念和学习能力，对于与他人互动非常重要。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，了解社会等级与学习和决策相结合的大脑机制可以提供对社会行为的跨诊断洞察力。通过在神经和认知层面上考虑社会背景的时间因素，对奖赏价值和学习与社会过程等心理结构之间的相互作用的检验，实现并扩展了研究领域标准(RDoC)倡议的目标。这项提案的目标1将调查稳定和短暂的社会信息如何整合到具有附属目标的决策中。在这里，参与者将在分配游戏中做出关于分享奖励的决定。具体的假设将通过结合功能磁共振成像(FMRI)和计算模型来测试，以测试当提供关于他人在稳定和暂时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报酬分享。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，允许评估复杂的信念学习，从对手所做的决定。假说将评估支持社交学习的大脑机制是否依赖于竞争对手的感知地位和权力。在完成目标1实验的同一参与者中研究这些过程将进一步允许比较等级身份表征。具体的测试将评估人类是否形成了根据不同维度的上下文而变化的潜在表征：附属目标与竞争目标、稳定的等级地位和短暂的等级地位。最后，目标3将调查这些神经表征如何与日常社会互动和个人对社会不平等的体验有关。当与那些感知等级模糊或与自己的等级不同的人互动时，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态的症状。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社会等级相关的情绪调节以及将不同社会等级的人的意图具体化的能力有关。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的潜在干预提供信息，这些干预措施可以缓解精神病理学中的社会决策缺陷。总体而言，这项建议旨在将候选人在功能神经成像和经济决策方面的专业知识结合起来，为候选人从事专注于社会决策的神经机制的独立研究生涯做好准备。

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.