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Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood

In a multisensory task, human adults integrate information from different sensory modalities -behaviorally in an optimal Bayesian fashion- while children mostly rely on a single sensor modality for decision making. The reason behind this change of behavior over age and the process behind learning th...

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Autores principales: Daee, Pedram, Mirian, Maryam S., Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4110011/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25058591
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0103143
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author Daee, Pedram
Mirian, Maryam S.
Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
author_facet Daee, Pedram
Mirian, Maryam S.
Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
author_sort Daee, Pedram
collection PubMed
description In a multisensory task, human adults integrate information from different sensory modalities -behaviorally in an optimal Bayesian fashion- while children mostly rely on a single sensor modality for decision making. The reason behind this change of behavior over age and the process behind learning the required statistics for optimal integration are still unclear and have not been justified by the conventional Bayesian modeling. We propose an interactive multisensory learning framework without making any prior assumptions about the sensory models. In this framework, learning in every modality and in their joint space is done in parallel using a single-step reinforcement learning method. A simple statistical test on confidence intervals on the mean of reward distributions is used to select the most informative source of information among the individual modalities and the joint space. Analyses of the method and the simulation results on a multimodal localization task show that the learning system autonomously starts with sensory selection and gradually switches to sensory integration. This is because, relying more on modalities -i.e. selection- at early learning steps (childhood) is more rewarding than favoring decisions learned in the joint space since, smaller state-space in modalities results in faster learning in every individual modality. In contrast, after gaining sufficient experiences (adulthood), the quality of learning in the joint space matures while learning in modalities suffers from insufficient accuracy due to perceptual aliasing. It results in tighter confidence interval for the joint space and consequently causes a smooth shift from selection to integration. It suggests that sensory selection and integration are emergent behavior and both are outputs of a single reward maximization process; i.e. the transition is not a preprogrammed phenomenon.
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spelling pubmed-41100112014-07-29 Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood Daee, Pedram Mirian, Maryam S. Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili PLoS One Research Article In a multisensory task, human adults integrate information from different sensory modalities -behaviorally in an optimal Bayesian fashion- while children mostly rely on a single sensor modality for decision making. The reason behind this change of behavior over age and the process behind learning the required statistics for optimal integration are still unclear and have not been justified by the conventional Bayesian modeling. We propose an interactive multisensory learning framework without making any prior assumptions about the sensory models. In this framework, learning in every modality and in their joint space is done in parallel using a single-step reinforcement learning method. A simple statistical test on confidence intervals on the mean of reward distributions is used to select the most informative source of information among the individual modalities and the joint space. Analyses of the method and the simulation results on a multimodal localization task show that the learning system autonomously starts with sensory selection and gradually switches to sensory integration. This is because, relying more on modalities -i.e. selection- at early learning steps (childhood) is more rewarding than favoring decisions learned in the joint space since, smaller state-space in modalities results in faster learning in every individual modality. In contrast, after gaining sufficient experiences (adulthood), the quality of learning in the joint space matures while learning in modalities suffers from insufficient accuracy due to perceptual aliasing. It results in tighter confidence interval for the joint space and consequently causes a smooth shift from selection to integration. It suggests that sensory selection and integration are emergent behavior and both are outputs of a single reward maximization process; i.e. the transition is not a preprogrammed phenomenon. Public Library of Science 2014-07-24 /pmc/articles/PMC4110011/ /pubmed/25058591 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0103143 Text en © 2014 Daee et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Daee, Pedram
Mirian, Maryam S.
Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood
title Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood
title_full Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood
title_fullStr Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood
title_full_unstemmed Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood
title_short Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood
title_sort reward maximization justifies the transition from sensory selection at childhood to sensory integration at adulthood
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4110011/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25058591
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0103143
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