Associative learning of social value

By Timothy Edward John Behrens, Laurence T. Hunt, Mark William Woolrich, Matthew F. S. Rushworth. 2008

892 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Our decisions are guided by information learnt from our environment. This information may come via personal experiences of reward, but also from the behaviour of social partners. Social learning is widely held to be distinct from other forms of learning in its mechanism and neural implementation; it is often assumed to compete with simpler mechanisms, such as reward-based associative learning, to drive behaviour. Recently, neural signals have been observed during social exchange reminiscent of signals seen in studies of associative learning. Here we demonstrate that social information may be acquired using the same associative processes assumed to underlie reward-based learning. We find that key computational variables for learning in the social and reward domains are processed in a similar fashion, but in parallel neural processing streams. Two neighbouring divisions of the anterior cingulate cortex were central to learning about social and reward-based information, and for determining the extent to which each source of information guides behaviour. When making a decision, however, the information learnt using these parallel streams was combined within ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that human social valuation can be realized by means of the same associative processes previously established for learning other, simpler, features of the environment.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “The response in MPFC tracks with trial-by-trial error in expectations about the informant’s reliability (Behrens et al., 2008).”
Dissociable neural representations of reinforcement and belief prediction errors underlie strategic learning (2012, result): “In a reward learning task where participants received social advice, activity in dorsomedial PFC was correlated with prediction errors associated with confederate ’ s ﬁ delity, whereas activity in the ventral striatum was correlated with the standard reward prediction error (34).”
A computational and neural model of momentary subjective well-being (2014, methodology): “As for the behavioral analysis, we again applied the higher standard of splitting the RPE term into separate components (27) and verified that striatal BOLD activity was positively modulated by EV at choice time, positively modulated by rewards at outcome time, and negatively modulated by EV at…”
Separate Valuation Subsystems for Delay and Effort Decision Costs (2010, result): “Although our vmPFC was more posterior than the anterior medial PFC reported in this study, it overlapped with the vmPFC region associated with valuation in other paradigms (Plassmann et al., 2007; Behrens et al., 2008; Hare et al., 2009).”
Great expectations: neural computations underlying the use of social norms in decision-making. (2011, background): “, 2004), weighting social prediction errors (Behrens et al., 2008) and conforming to others’ expectations (Klucharev et al.”
Insights from the application of computational neuroimaging to social neuroscience. (2013, background): “The authors found [39] that the time-varying model-derived uncertainty of subjects’ estimate of the sophistication of their opponent in a strategic game was encoded in a region of anterior dmPFC, overlapping the region of dmPFC found in [10] and [17], further emphasizing the importance of this area ”
Emotion and the Prefrontal Cortex: An Integrative Review (2017, background): “…could not account for the robust activation of the aMCC during events that may not involve control demands, including pain, threats, and rewards (Behrens et al., 2008; de la Vega et al., 2016; Eisenberger et al., 2011; Etkin et al., 2011; Hayden & Platt, 2010; Hutchison et al., 1999; Lieberman…”
Mechanisms of social cognition. (2012, background): “Monitoring own actions (Miele et al. 2011) Monitoring others’ actions (Pelphrey et al. 2004, Saxe et al. 2004) Monitoring others’ trustworthiness (Behrens et al. 2008) Monitoring others’ generosity (Cooper et al. 2010) Monitoring influence on others (Hampton et al. 2008) 4.”
Neurophysiology of performance monitoring and adaptive behavior. (2014, methodology): “Via direct connections from the striosomes to substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area (203, 209, 215), this information is conveyed to mesencephalic DA neurons which, in turn, broadcast the new RPE signals to the basal ganglia and frontal cortices, thereby closing the loop of the RL model.”
Neural basis of reinforcement learning and decision making. (2012, background): “For example, when decision makers are required to combine the information about reward history and social information, reliability of predictions based on these two different types of information is reflected separately in two different regions of the anterior cingulate cortex (Behrens et al. 2008).”
Connectivity-Based Parcellation of Human Cingulate Cortex and Its Relation to Functional Specialization (2009, neutral): “Again, in the human, the region has a key role in the assignment of value to social information (Behrens et al., 2008).”