scholarly journals Vicarious reward unblocks associative learning about novel cues in male rats

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sander van Gurp ◽  
Jochen Hoog ◽  
Tobias Kalenscher ◽  
Marijn van Wingerden
Keyword(s):  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Associative Learning ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Male Rats ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Reward Delivery ◽  
Social Signal ◽  
Reward Value ◽  
Vicarious Reward

AbstractMany species, including humans, are sensitive to social signals and their valuation is important in social learning. When social cues indicate that another is experiencing reward, they could convey vicarious reward value and prompt social learning. Here, we introduce a task that investigates if vicarious reward delivery in male rats can drive reinforcement learning in a formal associative learning paradigm. Using the blocking/unblocking paradigm, we found that when actor rats have fully learned a stimulus-self reward association, adding a cue that predicted additional partner reward unblocked associative learning about this cue. In contrast, additional cues that did not predict partner reward remained blocked from acquiring associative value. Preventing social signal exchange between the partners resulted in cues signaling partner reward remaining blocked. Taken together, these results suggest that vicarious rewards can drive reinforcement learning in rats, and that the transmission of social cues is necessary for this learning to occur.

scholarly journals Vicarious reward unblocks associative learning about novel cues in male rats

eLife ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sander van Gurp ◽  
Jochen Hoog ◽  
Tobias Kalenscher ◽  
Marijn van Wingerden
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Associative Learning ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Secondary Reinforcement ◽  
Male Rats ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Reward Delivery ◽  
Vicarious Reward

Many species, including rats, are sensitive to social signals and their valuation is important in social learning. Here we introduce a task that investigates if mutual reward delivery in male rats can drive associative learning. We found that when actor rats have fully learned a stimulus-self-reward association, adding a cue that predicted additional reward to a partner unblocked associative learning about this cue. By contrast, additional cues that did not predict partner reward remained blocked from acquiring positive associative value. Importantly, this social unblocking effect was still present when controlling for secondary reinforcement but absent when social information exchange was impeded, when mutual reward outcomes were disadvantageously unequal to the actor or when the added cue predicted reward delivery to an empty chamber. Taken together, these results suggest that mutual rewards can drive associative learning in rats and is dependent on vicariously experienced social and food-related cues.

scholarly journals Gaze-contingent reinforcement learning reveals incentive value of social signals in young children and adults

2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1850) ◽  
pp. 20162747 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angélina Vernetti ◽  
Tim J. Smith ◽  
Atsushi Senju
Keyword(s):  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Social Orienting ◽  
Incentive Value ◽  
Reward Delivery ◽  
New Findings

While numerous studies have demonstrated that infants and adults preferentially orient to social stimuli, it remains unclear as to what drives such preferential orienting. It has been suggested that the learned association between social cues and subsequent reward delivery might shape such social orienting. Using a novel, spontaneous indication of reinforcement learning (with the use of a gaze contingent reward-learning task), we investigated whether children and adults' orienting towards social and non-social visual cues can be elicited by the association between participants' visual attention and a rewarding outcome. Critically, we assessed whether the engaging nature of the social cues influences the process of reinforcement learning. Both children and adults learned to orient more often to the visual cues associated with reward delivery, demonstrating that cue–reward association reinforced visual orienting. More importantly, when the reward-predictive cue was social and engaging, both children and adults learned the cue–reward association faster and more efficiently than when the reward-predictive cue was social but non-engaging. These new findings indicate that social engaging cues have a positive incentive value. This could possibly be because they usually coincide with positive outcomes in real life, which could partly drive the development of social orienting.

scholarly journals Adolescent dopamine neurons represent reward differently during action and state guided learning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aqilah McCane ◽  
Meredyth Wegener ◽  
Mojdeh Faraji ◽  
Maria Rivera Garcia ◽  
Kathryn Wallin-Miller ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Associative Learning ◽  
Cell Number ◽  
Dopamine Neurons ◽  
Male Rats ◽  
Adolescent Male ◽  
Action Execution ◽  
Reward Delivery ◽  
Adolescents And Adults ◽  
Midbrain Dopamine ◽  
Midbrain Dopamine Neurons

The neuronal underpinning of learning cause-and-effect associations in the adolescent brain remains poorly understood. Two fundamental forms of associative learning are Pavlovian (classical) conditioning, where a stimulus is followed by an outcome, and operant (instrumental) conditioning, where outcome is contingent on action execution. Both forms of learning, when associated with a rewarding outcome, rely on midbrain dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and substantia nigra (SN). We find that in adolescent male rats, reward-guided associative learning is encoded differently by midbrain dopamine neurons in each conditioning paradigm. Whereas simultaneously recorded VTA and SN adult neurons have a similar phasic response to reward delivery during both forms of conditioning, adolescent neurons display a muted reward response during operant but a profoundly larger reward response during Pavlovian conditioning suggesting that adolescent neurons assign a different value to reward when it is not gated by action. The learning rate of adolescents and adults during both forms of conditioning was similar further supporting the notion that differences in reward response in each paradigm are due to differences in motivation and independent of state versus action value learning. Static characteristics of dopamine neurons such as dopamine cell number and size were similar in the VTA and SN but there were age differences in baseline firing rate, stimulated release and correlated spike activity suggesting that differences in reward responsiveness by adolescent dopamine neurons are not due to differences in intrinsic properties of these neurons but engagement of different networks.

scholarly journals Author response: Vicarious reward unblocks associative learning about novel cues in male rats

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sander van Gurp ◽  
Jochen Hoog ◽  
Tobias Kalenscher ◽  
Marijn van Wingerden
Keyword(s):  
Associative Learning ◽  
Male Rats ◽  
Author Response ◽  
Vicarious Reward

Does context matter? Effects of robot appearance and reliability on social attention differs based on lifelikeness of gaze task

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulaziz Abubshait ◽  
Patrick P. Weis ◽  
Eva Wiese
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Physical Appearance ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Attention ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
The Social ◽  
Behavioral Features

Social signals, such as changes in gaze direction, are essential cues to predict others’ mental states and behaviors (i.e., mentalizing). Studies show that humans can mentalize with non-human agents when they perceive a mind in them (i.e., mind perception). Robots that physically and/or behaviorally resemble humans likely trigger mind perception, which enhances the relevance of social cues and improves social-cognitive performance. The current ex-periments examine whether the effect of physical and behavioral influencers of mind perception on social-cognitive processing is modulated by the lifelikeness of a social interaction. Participants interacted with robots of varying degrees of physical (humanlike vs. robot-like) and behavioral (reliable vs. random) human-likeness while the lifelikeness of a social attention task was manipulated across five experiments. The first four experiments manipulated lifelikeness via the physical realism of the robot images (Study 1 and 2), the biological plausibility of the social signals (Study 3), and the plausibility of the social con-text (Study 4). They showed that humanlike behavior affected social attention whereas appearance affected mind perception ratings. However, when the lifelikeness of the interaction was increased by using videos of a human and a robot sending the social cues in a realistic environment (Study 5), social attention mechanisms were affected both by physical appearance and behavioral features, while mind perception ratings were mainly affected by physical appearance. This indicates that in order to understand the effect of physical and behavioral features on social cognition, paradigms should be used that adequately simulate the lifelikeness of social interactions.

Social Value Unblocks Pavlovian Reinforcement Learning in Male Rats

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sander van Gurp ◽  
Jochen Hoog ◽  
Tobias Kalenscher ◽  
Marijn van Wingerden
Keyword(s):  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Male Rats

A stress-induced anxious state in male rats: Corticotropin-releasing hormone induces persistent changes in associative learning and startle reactivity

2005 ◽  
Vol 57 (8) ◽  
pp. 865-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Servatius ◽  
Kevin D. Beck ◽  
Roberta L. Moldow ◽  
Gabriel Salameh ◽  
Tara P. Tumminello ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Associative Learning ◽  
Male Rats ◽  
Corticotropin Releasing Hormone ◽  
Releasing Hormone ◽  
Anxious State

scholarly journals Temporal Uncertainty During Overshadowing

2011 ◽  
pp. 46-55
Author(s):  
Dómhnall J. Jennings ◽  
Eduardo Alonso ◽  
Esther Mondragón ◽  
Charlotte Bonardi
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Associative Learning ◽  
Learning Theories ◽  
Temporal Difference ◽  
Temporal Uncertainty ◽  
Learning Problem ◽  
Difference Model ◽  
Distribution Form ◽  
Temporal Properties

Standard associative learning theories typically fail to conceptualise the temporal properties of a stimulus, and hence cannot easily make predictions about the effects such properties might have on the magnitude of conditioning phenomena. Despite this, in intuitive terms we might expect that the temporal properties of a stimulus that is paired with some outcome to be important. In particular, there is no previous research addressing the way that fixed or variable duration stimuli can affect overshadowing. In this chapter we report results which show that the degree of overshadowing depends on the distribution form - fixed or variable - of the overshadowing stimulus, and argue that conditioning is weaker under conditions of temporal uncertainty. These results are discussed in terms of models of conditioning and timing. We conclude that the temporal difference model, which has been extensively applied to the reinforcement learning problem in machine learning, accounts for the key findings of our study.

Augmented reality coloring book: An interactive strategy for teaching children with autism to focus on specific nonverbal social cues to promote their social skills

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 256-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
I-Jui Lee
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Maintenance Phase ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Single Subject ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Single Subject Research ◽  
Children With Asd ◽  
Ability To Act

Abstract Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) reduce one’s ability to act appropriately in social situations. Increasing evidence indicates that children with ASD might ignore nonverbal social cues that usually aid social interaction because they do not recognize or understand them. We asked children with ASD to color an augmented reality coloring book (ARCB) to teach them how to recognize and understand some specific social signals and to ignore others. ARCB materials teach children to recognize and understand social signals in various ways. They can, for example, view 3D animations of the ARCB materials on a tablet computer. Thus, the ARCB can be used to help children with ASD focus their attention on the meaning and social value of nonverbal behaviors in specific social situations. The ARCB has multiple functions: it extends the social features of the story, and it restricts attention to the most important parts of the videos. Single-subject research with a multiple-baselines across-subject design was used in this study. After five weeks of ARCB training intervention, all 3 participants’ scores rose significantly and dramatically during the intervention phase (mean rate of correct answers improved from 14.24% to 47.33%), and remained significantly higher in the maintenance phase than at baseline. We conclude that coloring pictures of social situations may help children with ASD recognize and better understand these situations.

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