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Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning

Our personal preferences affect a broad array of social behaviors. This includes the way we learn the preferences of others, an ability that often relies on limited or ambiguous information. Here we report an egocentric influence on this type of social learning that is reflected in both performance...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Tarantola, Tor, Kumaran, Dharshan, Dayan, Peter, De Martino, Benedetto
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5635122/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29018195
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00826-8
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author Tarantola, Tor
Kumaran, Dharshan
Dayan, Peter
De Martino, Benedetto
author_facet Tarantola, Tor
Kumaran, Dharshan
Dayan, Peter
De Martino, Benedetto
author_sort Tarantola, Tor
collection PubMed
description Our personal preferences affect a broad array of social behaviors. This includes the way we learn the preferences of others, an ability that often relies on limited or ambiguous information. Here we report an egocentric influence on this type of social learning that is reflected in both performance and response times. Using computational models that combine inter-trial learning and intra-trial choice, we find transient effects of participants’ preferences on the learning process, through the influence of priors, and persistent effects on the choice process. A second experiment shows that these effects generalize to non-social learning, though participants in the social learning experiment appeared to additionally benefit by using their knowledge about the popularity of certain preferences. We further find that the domain-general egocentric influences we identify can yield performance advantages in uncertain environments.
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spelling pubmed-56351222017-10-12 Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning Tarantola, Tor Kumaran, Dharshan Dayan, Peter De Martino, Benedetto Nat Commun Article Our personal preferences affect a broad array of social behaviors. This includes the way we learn the preferences of others, an ability that often relies on limited or ambiguous information. Here we report an egocentric influence on this type of social learning that is reflected in both performance and response times. Using computational models that combine inter-trial learning and intra-trial choice, we find transient effects of participants’ preferences on the learning process, through the influence of priors, and persistent effects on the choice process. A second experiment shows that these effects generalize to non-social learning, though participants in the social learning experiment appeared to additionally benefit by using their knowledge about the popularity of certain preferences. We further find that the domain-general egocentric influences we identify can yield performance advantages in uncertain environments. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-10-10 /pmc/articles/PMC5635122/ /pubmed/29018195 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00826-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Tarantola, Tor
Kumaran, Dharshan
Dayan, Peter
De Martino, Benedetto
Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning
title Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning
title_full Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning
title_fullStr Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning
title_full_unstemmed Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning
title_short Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning
title_sort prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5635122/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29018195
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00826-8
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