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Learning Where to Look for High Value Improves Decision Making Asymmetrically

Decision making in any brain is imperfect and costly in terms of time and energy. Operating under such constraints, an organism could be in a position to improve performance if an opportunity arose to exploit informative patterns in the environment being searched. Such an improvement of performance...

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Autores principales: Colas, Jaron T., Lu, Joy
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5695242/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29187831
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02000
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author Colas, Jaron T.
Lu, Joy
author_facet Colas, Jaron T.
Lu, Joy
author_sort Colas, Jaron T.
collection PubMed
description Decision making in any brain is imperfect and costly in terms of time and energy. Operating under such constraints, an organism could be in a position to improve performance if an opportunity arose to exploit informative patterns in the environment being searched. Such an improvement of performance could entail both faster and more accurate (i.e., reward-maximizing) decisions. The present study investigated the extent to which human participants could learn to take advantage of immediate patterns in the spatial arrangement of serially presented foods such that a region of space would consistently be associated with greater subjective value. Eye movements leading up to choices demonstrated rapidly induced biases in the selective allocation of visual fixation and attention that were accompanied by both faster and more accurate choices of desired goods as implicit learning occurred. However, for the control condition with its spatially balanced reward environment, these subjects exhibited preexisting lateralized biases for eye and hand movements (i.e., leftward and rightward, respectively) that could act in opposition not only to each other but also to the orienting biases elicited by the experimental manipulation, producing an asymmetry between the left and right hemifields with respect to performance. Potentially owing at least in part to learned cultural conventions (e.g., reading from left to right), the findings herein particularly revealed an intrinsic leftward bias underlying initial saccades in the midst of more immediate feedback-directed processes for which spatial biases can be learned flexibly to optimize oculomotor and manual control in value-based decision making. The present study thus replicates general findings of learned attentional biases in a novel context with inherently rewarding stimuli and goes on to further elucidate the interactions between endogenous and exogenous biases.
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spelling pubmed-56952422017-11-29 Learning Where to Look for High Value Improves Decision Making Asymmetrically Colas, Jaron T. Lu, Joy Front Psychol Psychology Decision making in any brain is imperfect and costly in terms of time and energy. Operating under such constraints, an organism could be in a position to improve performance if an opportunity arose to exploit informative patterns in the environment being searched. Such an improvement of performance could entail both faster and more accurate (i.e., reward-maximizing) decisions. The present study investigated the extent to which human participants could learn to take advantage of immediate patterns in the spatial arrangement of serially presented foods such that a region of space would consistently be associated with greater subjective value. Eye movements leading up to choices demonstrated rapidly induced biases in the selective allocation of visual fixation and attention that were accompanied by both faster and more accurate choices of desired goods as implicit learning occurred. However, for the control condition with its spatially balanced reward environment, these subjects exhibited preexisting lateralized biases for eye and hand movements (i.e., leftward and rightward, respectively) that could act in opposition not only to each other but also to the orienting biases elicited by the experimental manipulation, producing an asymmetry between the left and right hemifields with respect to performance. Potentially owing at least in part to learned cultural conventions (e.g., reading from left to right), the findings herein particularly revealed an intrinsic leftward bias underlying initial saccades in the midst of more immediate feedback-directed processes for which spatial biases can be learned flexibly to optimize oculomotor and manual control in value-based decision making. The present study thus replicates general findings of learned attentional biases in a novel context with inherently rewarding stimuli and goes on to further elucidate the interactions between endogenous and exogenous biases. Frontiers Media S.A. 2017-11-15 /pmc/articles/PMC5695242/ /pubmed/29187831 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02000 Text en Copyright © 2017 Colas and Lu. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Colas, Jaron T.
Lu, Joy
Learning Where to Look for High Value Improves Decision Making Asymmetrically
title Learning Where to Look for High Value Improves Decision Making Asymmetrically
title_full Learning Where to Look for High Value Improves Decision Making Asymmetrically
title_fullStr Learning Where to Look for High Value Improves Decision Making Asymmetrically
title_full_unstemmed Learning Where to Look for High Value Improves Decision Making Asymmetrically
title_short Learning Where to Look for High Value Improves Decision Making Asymmetrically
title_sort learning where to look for high value improves decision making asymmetrically
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5695242/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29187831
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02000
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