Individual differences in autism-like traits are associated with reduced goal emulation in a computational model of observational learning.

One's ability to infer the goals and intentions of others is crucial for social interactions, and such social capabilities are broadly distributed across individuals. Autism-like traits (i.e.

Anterior cingulate cortex lesions impair multiple facets of task engagement not mediated by dorsomedial striatum neuron firing.

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been implicated across multiple highly specialized cognitive functions-including task engagement, motivation, error detection, attention allocation, value processing, and action selection. Here, we ask if ACC lesions disrupt task performance and firing in dorsomedial striatum (DMS) during the performance of a reward-guided decision-making task that engages many of these cognitive functions. We found that ACC lesions impacted several facets of task performance-including decreasing the initiation and completion of trials, slowing reaction times, and resulting in suboptimal and inaccurate action selection.

Heterogeneity in strategy use during arbitration between experiential and observational learning.

To navigate our complex social world, it is crucial to deploy multiple learning strategies, such as learning from directly experiencing action outcomes or from observing other people's behavior. Despite the prevalence of experiential and observational learning in humans and other social animals, it remains unclear how people favor one strategy over the other depending on the environment, and how individuals vary in their strategy use. Here, we describe an arbitration mechanism in which the prediction errors associated with each learning strategy influence their weight over behavior.

Optogenetic Inhibition of Rat Anterior Cingulate Cortex Impairs the Ability to Initiate and Stay on Task.

Our prior research has identified neural correlates of cognitive control in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), leading us to hypothesize that the ACC is necessary for increasing attention as rats flexibly learn new contingencies during a complex reward-guided decision-making task. Here, we tested this hypothesis by using optogenetics to transiently inhibit the ACC, while rats of either sex performed the same two-choice task. ACC inhibition had a profound impact on behavior that extended beyond deficits in attention during learning when expected outcomes were uncertain.

Interactive cognitive maps support flexible behavior under threat.

In social environments, survival can depend upon inferring and adapting to other agents' goal-directed behavior. However, it remains unclear how humans achieve this, despite the fact that many decisions must account for complex, dynamic agents acting according to their own goals. Here, we use a predator-prey task (total n = 510) to demonstrate that humans exploit an interactive cognitive map of the social environment to infer other agents' preferences and simulate their future behavior, providing for flexible, generalizable responses.

Computationally-defined markers of uncertainty aversion predict emotional responses during a global pandemic.

Exposure to stressful life events involving threat and uncertainty often results in the development of anxiety. However, the factors that confer risk and resilience for anxiety following real world stress at a computational level remain unclear. We identified core components of uncertainty aversion moderating response to stress posed by the COVID-19 pandemic derived from computational modeling of decision making.

Anxiety increases information-seeking in response to large changes.

Seeking information when anxious may help reduce the aversive feeling of uncertainty and guide decision-making. If information is negative or confusing, however, this may increase anxiety further. Information gathered under anxiety can thus be beneficial and/or damaging.

Domain specificity versus process specificity: The "social brain" during strategic interaction.

Are social brain responses domain specific, or do domain-general but socially prevalent cognitive processes drive activity in this network? In this issue of Neuron, Konovalov et al. (2021) address this by dissociating general sociality from reactivity, one defining feature of social interactions.

Economic Decisions with Ambiguous Outcome Magnitudes Vary with Low and High Stakes but Not Trait Anxiety or Depression.

Most of life's decisions involve risk and uncertainty regarding whether reward or loss will follow. Decision makers often face uncertainty not only about the likelihood of outcomes (what are the chances that I will get a raise if I ask my supervisor? What are the chances that my supervisor will be upset with me for asking?) but also the magnitude of outcomes (if I do get a raise, how large will it be? If my supervisor gets upset, how bad will the consequences be for me?). Only a few studies have investigated economic decision making with ambiguous likelihoods, and even fewer have investigated ambiguous outcome magnitudes.

Why and how the brain weights contributions from a mixture of experts.

It has long been suggested that human behavior reflects the contributions of multiple systems that cooperate or compete for behavioral control. Here we propose that the brain acts as a "Mixture of Experts" in which different expert systems propose strategies for action. It will be argued that the brain determines which experts should control behavior at any one moment in time by keeping track of the reliability of the predictions within each system, and by allocating control over behavior in a manner that depends on the relative reliabilities across experts.

Repetitive negative thinking following exposure to a natural stressor prospectively predicts altered stress responding and decision-making in the laboratory.

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) represents a transdiagnostic risk factor for affective disorders, and stress is theorized to exacerbate this vulnerability. One mechanism by which stress may influence individual differences in psychiatric symptoms is through altered decision-making, and loss aversion in particular. The present study uses multiple methods to investigate the relationships between RNT, stress, and decision-making.

A Neuro-computational Account of Arbitration between Choice Imitation and Goal Emulation during Human Observational Learning.

When individuals learn from observing the behavior of others, they deploy at least two distinct strategies. Choice imitation involves repeating other agents' previous actions, whereas emulation proceeds from inferring their goals and intentions. Despite the prevalence of observational learning in humans and other social animals, a fundamental question remains unaddressed: how does the brain decide which strategy to use in a given situation? In two fMRI studies (the second a pre-registered replication of the first), we identify a neuro-computational mechanism underlying arbitration between choice imitation and goal emulation.

Neural predictors of treatment response to brain stimulation and psychological therapy in depression: a double-blind randomized controlled trial.

Standard depression treatments, including antidepressant medication and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), are ineffective for many patients. Prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been proposed as an alternative treatment, but has shown inconsistent efficacy for depression, and its mechanisms are poorly understood. We recruited unmedicated patients with major depressive disorder (N = 71 approached; N = 39 randomised) for a mechanistic, double-blind, randomized controlled trial consisting of eight weekly sessions of prefrontal tDCS administered to the left prefrontal cortex prior to CBT.

The application of computational models to social neuroscience: promises and pitfalls.

Interactions with conspecifics are key to any social species. In order to navigate this social world, it is crucial for individuals to learn from and about others. From learning new skills by observing parents perform them to making complex collective decisions, understanding the mechanisms underlying social cognitive processes has been of considerable interest to psychologists and neuroscientists.

Valuation of knowledge and ignorance in mesolimbic reward circuitry.

The pursuit of knowledge is a basic feature of human nature. However, in domains ranging from health to finance people sometimes choose to remain ignorant. Here, we show that valence is central to the process by which the human brain evaluates the opportunity to gain information, explaining why knowledge may not always be preferred.

Enhanced Risk Aversion, But Not Loss Aversion, in Unmedicated Pathological Anxiety.

Background: Anxiety disorders are associated with disruptions in both emotional processing and decision making. As a result, anxious individuals often make decisions that favor harm avoidance. However, this bias could be driven by enhanced aversion to uncertainty about the decision outcome (e.

Anxiety promotes memory for mood-congruent faces but does not alter loss aversion.

Pathological anxiety is associated with disrupted cognitive processing, including working memory and decision-making. In healthy individuals, experimentally-induced state anxiety or high trait anxiety often results in the deployment of adaptive harm-avoidant behaviours. However, how these processes affect cognition is largely unknown.

Models of Affective Decision Making: How Do Feelings Predict Choice?

Intuitively, how you feel about potential outcomes will determine your decisions. Indeed, an implicit assumption in one of the most influential theories in psychology, prospect theory, is that feelings govern choice. Surprisingly, however, very little is known about the rules by which feelings are transformed into decisions.

Emotion-induced loss aversion and striatal-amygdala coupling in low-anxious individuals.

Adapting behavior to changes in the environment is a crucial ability for survival but such adaptation varies widely across individuals. Here, we asked how humans alter their economic decision-making in response to emotional cues, and whether this is related to trait anxiety. Developing an emotional decision-making task for functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which gambling decisions were preceded by emotional and non-emotional primes, we assessed emotional influences on loss aversion, the tendency to overweigh potential monetary losses relative to gains.

Human Frontal-Subcortical Circuit and Asymmetric Belief Updating.

Unlabelled: How humans integrate information to form beliefs about reality is a question that has engaged scientists for centuries, yet the biological system supporting this process is not well understood. One of the most salient attributes of information is valence. Whether a piece of news is good or bad is critical in determining whether it will alter our beliefs.

LIP activity in the interstimulus interval of a change detection task biases the behavioral response.

When looking around at the world, we can only attend to a limited number of locations. The lateral intraparietal area (LIP) is thought to play a role in guiding both covert attention and eye movements. In this study, we tested the involvement of LIP in both mechanisms with a change detection task.

Context-driven activation of odor representations in the absence of olfactory stimuli in the olfactory bulb and piriform cortex.

Sensory neural activity is highly context dependent and shaped by experience and expectation. In the olfactory bulb (OB), the first cerebral relay of olfactory processing, responses to odorants are shaped by previous experiences including contextual information thanks to strong feedback connections. In the present experiment, mice were conditioned to associate an odorant with a visual context and were then exposed to the visual context alone.