Credit assignment in hierarchical option transfer

Humans have the exceptional ability to efficiently structure past knowledge during learning to enable fast generalization. Xia and Collins (2021) evaluated this ability in a hierarchically structured, sequential decision-making task, where participants could build “options” (strategy “chunks”) at multiple levels of temporal and state abstraction. A quantitative model, the Option Model, captured the transfer effects observed in human participants, suggesting that humans create and compose hierarchical options and use them to explore novel contexts. However, it is not well understood how learning in a new context is attributed to new and old options (i.e., the credit assignment problem). In a new context with new contingencies, where participants can recompose some aspects of previously learned options, do they reliably create new options or overwrite existing ones? Does the credit assignment depend on how similar the new option is to an old one? In our experiment, two groups of participants (n=124 and n=104) learned hierarchically structured options, experienced different amounts of negative transfer in a new option context, and were subsequently tested on the previously learned options. Behavioral analysis showed that old options were successfully reused without interference, and new options were appropriately created and credited. This credit assignment did not depend on how similar the new option was to the old option, showing great flexibility and precision in human hierarchical learning. These behavioral results were captured by the Option Model, providing further evidence for option learning and transfer in humans.