Behavioral and neural properties of social reinforcement learning

By Rebecca M. Jones, Leah H. Somerville, Jian Li, Erika J. Ruberry, Victoria Libby, Gary H. Glover, Henning U. Voss, D. Ballon, B. Casey. 2011

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social learning is critical for engaging in complex interactions with other individuals. Learning from positive social exchanges, such as acceptance from peers, may be similar to basic reinforcement learning. We formally test this hypothesis by developing a novel paradigm that is based on work in nonhuman primates and human imaging studies of reinforcement learning. The probability of receiving positive social reinforcement from three distinct peers was parametrically manipulated while brain activity was recorded in healthy adults using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Over the course of the experiment, participants responded more quickly to faces of peers who provided more frequent positive social reinforcement, and rated them as more likeable. Modeling trial-by-trial learning showed ventral striatum and orbital frontal cortex activity correlated positively with forming expectations about receiving social reinforcement. Rostral anterior cingulate cortex activity tracked positively with modulations of expected value of the cues (peers). Together, the findings across three levels of analysis—social preferences, response latencies, and modeling neural responses—are consistent with reinforcement learning theory and nonhuman primate electrophysiological studies of reward. This work highlights the fundamental influence of acceptance by one's peers in altering subsequent behavior.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “Because predictive coding is most familiar from the context of reward learning, there has been considerable interest in linking predictive coding to social reward learning (Behrens et al., 2009; Jones et al., 2011; Fehr and Camerer, 2007).”
Prediction-error in the context of real social relationships modulates reward system activity (2012, background): “ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE published: 08 August 2012 doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00218 Prediction-error in the context of real social relationships modulates reward system activity”
The role of prediction in social neuroscience (2012, background): “In support of this, Jones et al. (2011) found neural activity in areas associated with basic reinforcement learning during a task involving acceptance from peers.”
Beyond simple models of self-control to circuit-based accounts of adolescent behavior. (2015, background): “…shows overlapping neural circuitry for social (praise, gain in reputation, positive affect) and nonsocial (juice, money) rewards (Bhanji & Delgado 2013, Fareri et al. 2012, Izuma et al. 2008, Jones et al. 2011, Lin et al. 2012, Meshi et al. 2013, Rademacher et al. 2010, van den Bos et al. 2007).”