scholarly journals Sex differences in learning from exploration

eLife ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy S Chen ◽  
Evan Knep ◽  
Autumn Han ◽  
R Becket Ebitz ◽  
Nicola Grissom
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sex Differences ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Latent Variables ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Computational Tools ◽  
Female Mice ◽  
Correct Performance ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Similar Accuracy

Sex-based modulation of cognitive processes could set the stage for individual differences in vulnerability to neuropsychiatric disorders. While value-based decision making processes in particular have been proposed to be influenced by sex differences, the overall correct performance in decision making tasks often show variable or minimal differences across sexes. Computational tools allow us to uncover latent variables that define different decision making approaches, even in animals with similar correct performance. Here, we quantify sex differences in mice in the latent variables underlying behavior in a classic value-based decision making task: a restless 2-armed bandit. While male and female mice had similar accuracy, they achieved this performance via different patterns of exploration. Male mice tended to make more exploratory choices overall, largely because they appeared to get 'stuck' in exploration once they had started. Female mice tended to explore less but learned more quickly during exploration. Together, these results suggest that sex exerts stronger influences on decision making during periods of learning and exploration than during stable choices. Exploration during decision making is altered in people diagnosed with addictions, depression, and neurodevelopmental disabilities, pinpointing the neural mechanisms of exploration as a highly translational avenue for conferring sex-modulated vulnerability to neuropsychiatric diagnoses.

scholarly journals Sex differences in learning from exploration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy S. Chen ◽  
Evan Knep ◽  
Autumn Han ◽  
R. Becket Ebitz ◽  
Nicola M. Grissom
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sex Differences ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Latent Variables ◽  
Neuropsychiatric Disorders ◽  
Computational Tools ◽  
Correct Performance ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
Similar Accuracy

AbstractSex differences in cognitive processes could set the stage for sex-modulated vulnerability to neuropsychiatric disorders. While value-based decision making processes in particular have been proposed to be influenced by sex differences, the overall correct performance across sexes often show minimal differences. Computational tools allow us to uncover latent variables in reinforcement learning that define different decision making approaches, even in animals with similar correct performance. Here, we quantify sex differences in latent variables underlying behavior in a classic value-based decision-making task: a restless 2-armed bandit. While males and females had similar accuracy, they achieved this performance via different patterns of exploration. Males made more exploratory choices overall, largely because they appeared to get stuck in exploration once they had started. Females explored less, but learned more quickly when they did so. Together, these results suggest that sex exerts stronger influences on learning and decision making during periods of self-initiated exploration than during stable choices. These findings pinpoint the neural mechanisms of exploration as potentially conferring sex-biased vulnerability to addictions, neurodevelopmental disabilities, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

scholarly journals Pathways to Implementation: Evidence on How Participation in Environmental Governance Impacts on Environmental Outcomes

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas W Jager ◽  
Jens Newig ◽  
Edward Challies ◽  
Elisa Kochskämper
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Latent Variables ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Social Outcomes ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Environmental Standard ◽  
Stakeholder Perspectives ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Modes Of Governance

Abstract There is much enthusiasm among scholars and public administrators for participatory and collaborative modes of governance as a means to tackle contemporary environmental problems. Participatory and collaborative approaches are expected to both enhance the environmental standard of the outputs of decision-making processes and improve the implementation of these outputs. In this article, we draw on a database of 307 coded published cases of public environmental decision-making to identify key pathways via which participation fosters effective environmental governance. We develop a conceptual model of the hypothesized relationship between participation, environmental outputs, and implementation, mediated by intermediate (social) outcomes such as social learning or trust building. Testing these assumptions through structural equation modeling and exploratory factor analysis, we find a generally positive effect of participation on the environmental standard of governance outputs, in particular where communication intensity is high and where participants are delegated decision-making power. Moreover, we identify two latent variables—convergence of stakeholder perspectives and stakeholder capacity building—to mediate this relationship. Our findings point to a need for treating complex and multifaceted phenomena such as participation in a nuanced manner, and to pay attention to how particular mechanisms work to foster a range of social outcomes and to secure more environmentally effective outputs and their implementation.

scholarly journals A Theory of Guilt Appeals: A Review Showing the Importance of Investigating Cognitive Processes as Mediators between Emotion and Behavior

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Aurélien Graton ◽  
Melody Mailliez
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Behaviors ◽  
Prosocial Behaviors ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Attentional Biases ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Attentional Processes ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
And Behavior

Guilt appeals in the field of persuasion are quite common. However, the effectiveness of these messages is sometimes ambivalent. It is widely acknowledged that guilt leads people to engage into prosocial behaviors, but the effects of guilt can also be counter-productive (e.g., reactance-like effects). We argue that the explanations for these contradictions remain unsatisfactory and suggest that taking into account the implications of underlying cognitive—especially attentional—mechanisms would provide a better understanding of these paradoxical outcomes. This article provides a brief review of the literature on the link between guilt and pro-social behaviors and its classical interpretations. We propose a reinterpretation of this link by taking into account specific attentional processes triggered by the emotion of guilt. Attentional biases are, in our opinion, better predictors of the effectiveness of a message than the amount of emotion induced by the same message. This consideration should guide future research in the field of guilt appeals and pro-social behaviors. Implications, in terms of a broader comprehension of the emotion–behavior association in decision making processes, are discussed.

Cognitive Model of Team Collaboration: Macro-Cognitive Focus

2005 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Warner ◽  
Michael Letsky ◽  
Michael Cowen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Cognitive Model ◽  
Distributed Teams ◽  
Descriptive Model ◽  
Team Collaboration ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
Decision Making Processes

The purpose of this paper is to describe a cognitive model of team collaboration emphasizing the human decision-making processes used during team collaboration. The descriptive model includes the domain characteristics, collaboration stages, meta- and macro cognitive processes and the mechanisms for achieving the stages and cognitive processes. Two experiments were designed to provide empirical data on the validity of the collaboration stages and cognitive processes of the model. Both face-to-face and asynchronous, distributed teams demonstrated behavior that supports the existence of the collaboration stages along with seven cognitive processes.

scholarly journals Spatial gradient in activity within the insula reflects dissociable neural mechanisms underlying context-dependent advantageous and disadvantageous inequity aversion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoxue Gao ◽  
Hongbo Yu ◽  
Ignacio Saez ◽  
Philip R. Blue ◽  
Lusha Zhu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Inequity Aversion ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Anterior Cingulate ◽  
Spatial Gradient ◽  
Model Free ◽  
Interpersonal Guilt ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Context Dependent

AbstractHumans are capable of integrating social contextual information into decision-making processes to adjust their attitudes towards inequity. This context-dependency emerges both when individual is better off (i.e. advantageous inequity) and worse off (i.e. disadvantageous inequity) than others. It is not clear however, whether the context-dependent processing of advantageous and disadvantageous inequity rely on dissociable or shared neural mechanisms. Here, by combining an interpersonal interactive game that gave rise to interpersonal guilt and different versions of the dictator games that enabled us to characterize individual weights on aversion to advantageous and disadvantageous inequity, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the two forms of inequity aversion in the interpersonal guilt context. In each round, participants played a dot-estimation task with an anonymous co-player. The co-players received pain stimulation with 50% probability when anyone responded incorrectly. At the end of each round, participants completed a dictator game, which determined payoffs of him/herself and the co-player. Both computational model-based and model-free analyses demonstrated that when inflicting pain upon co-players (i.e., the guilt context), participants cared more about advantageous inequity and became less sensitive to disadvantageous inequity, compared with other social contexts. The contextual effects on two forms of inequity aversion are uncorrelated with each other at the behavioral level. Neuroimaging results revealed that the context-dependent representation of inequity aversion exhibited a spatial gradient in activity within the insula, with anterior parts predominantly involved in the aversion to advantageous inequity and posterior parts predominantly involved in the aversion to disadvantageous inequity. The dissociable mechanisms underlying the two forms of inequity aversion are further supported by the involvement of right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in advantageous inequity processing, and the involvement of right amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in disadvantageous inequity processing. These results extended our understanding of decision-making processes involving inequity and the social functions of inequity aversion.

Cognitive Process Elements of People Decision-Making

2019 ◽  
pp. 602-611
Author(s):  
Thais Spiegel
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Individual Decision ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Individual Decision Making ◽  
Corporate Context ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Process Elements

The ability to make choices is regarded as essential to human action and to modern life, individually, collectively, and in the corporate context, and is crucial to the concept of freedom. This chapter examines individual decision-making processes. In this respect, it is important to distinguish between the task of deciding, described as a system of events and relationships in the external, “objective” world and the system of cognitive processes that take place in the “psychological world.” The study of decision making has a long history that spans a variety of perspectives, philosophical positions, and prescriptions—amidst a great deal of controversy—that have evolved into descriptive processes and approximated how decisions are actually taken. This exploratory study builds on the premise that, in order for decision making to be understood completely and improved, the underlying cognitive processes must be examined. It thus sets out to identify how decision making is shaped by the cognitive processes of the agents involved.

Business Ethics and the Brain: Rommel Salvador and Robert G. Folger

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rommel Salvador ◽  
Robert G. Folger
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
Ethical Decision ◽  
Ethical Decision Making ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Ethics Training ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
The Brain

ABSTRACT:Neuroethics, the study of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying ethical decision-making, is a growing field of study. In this review, we identify and discuss four themes emerging from neuroethics research. First, ethical decision-making appears to be distinct from other types of decision-making processes. Second, ethical decision-making entails more than just conscious reasoning. Third, emotion plays a critical role in ethical decision-making, at least under certain circumstances. Lastly, normative approaches to morality have distinct, underlying neural mechanisms. On the basis of these themes, we draw implications for research in business ethics and the practice of ethics training.

Judging the World Dialectically versus Non-Dialectically

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiko Masuda ◽  
Liman Man Wai Li ◽  
Matthew J. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Thinking Styles ◽  
Dialectical Thinking ◽  
North Americans ◽  
Analytical Thinking ◽  
Meaning Systems ◽  
Decision Making Processes

For over three decades, cultural psychologists have advocated the importance of cultural meaning systems and their effects on basic modes of perception and cognition. This chapter reviews findings which have demonstrated that culturally dominant ways of thinking influence people’s basic perceptual and cognitive processes: East Asians are more likely to endorse holistic thinking and dialectical thinking style when they process information, such that they incorporate more contextual information into their judgments of focal objects, and North Americans are more likely to endorse non-dialectical thinking and analytical thinking styles, by focusing on foreground information. The chapter also reviews recent findings related to higher cognitive processes in judgments and decision making processes. It emphasizes two lines of research showing how cultural differences in perception and cognition affect the online decision making process, one involving various online processes in decision making and the other involving how cultures experience indecisiveness in their decisions. Finally, this chapter introduces recent findings highlighting how cultural differences in perception and cognition affect how people make judgments involved in resource allocation, how cultural consistency values affect personality judgments, and how memory judgments are affected by neural cues. To close, it discusses the importance of this line of research and its future directions.

Influence of Expected Reward on Temporal Order Judgment

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 674-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohsen Rakhshan ◽  
Vivian Lee ◽  
Emily Chu ◽  
Lauren Harris ◽  
Lillian Laiks ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sensory Processing ◽  
Temporal Order Judgment ◽  
Target Selection ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Perceptual Bias ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Reward Effects

Perceptual decision-making has been shown to be influenced by reward expected from alternative options or actions, but the underlying neural mechanisms are currently unknown. More specifically, it is debated whether reward effects are mediated through changes in sensory processing, later stages of decision-making, or both. To address this question, we conducted two experiments in which human participants made saccades to what they perceived to be either the first or second of two visually identical but asynchronously presented targets while we manipulated expected reward from correct and incorrect responses on each trial. By comparing reward-induced bias in target selection (i.e., reward bias) during the two experiments, we determined whether reward caused changes in sensory or decision-making processes. We found similar reward biases in the two experiments indicating that reward information mainly influenced later stages of decision-making. Moreover, the observed reward biases were independent of the individual's sensitivity to sensory signals. This suggests that reward effects were determined heuristically via modulation of decision-making processes instead of sensory processing. To further explain our findings and uncover plausible neural mechanisms, we simulated our experiments with a cortical network model and tested alternative mechanisms for how reward could exert its influence. We found that our experimental observations are more compatible with reward-dependent input to the output layer of the decision circuit. Together, our results suggest that, during a temporal judgment task, reward exerts its influence via changing later stages of decision-making (i.e., response bias) rather than early sensory processing (i.e., perceptual bias).

scholarly journals The description-experience gap: a challenge for the neuroeconomics of decision-making under uncertainty

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basile Garcia ◽  
Fabien Cerrotti ◽  
Stefano Palminteri
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Loss Aversion ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Decision Making Under Uncertainty ◽  
Primate Research ◽  
Research Framework ◽  
Decision Variables ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Human Primate

The experimental investigation of decision-making in humans relies on two distinct types of paradigms, involving either description- or experience-based choices. In description-based paradigms decision variables (i.e., payoffs and probabilities) are explicitly communicated by mean of symbols. In experience-based paradigms decision variables are learnt from trial-by-trial feedback. In the decision-making literature ‘description-experience gap’ refers to the fact that different biases are observed in the two experimental paradigms. Remarkably, well-documented biases of description-based choices, such as under-weighting of rare events and loss aversion, do not apply to experience-based decisions. Here we argue that the description-experience gap represents a major challenge, not only to current decision theories, but also to the neuroeconomics research framework, which reliesheavily on the translation of neurophysiological findings between human and non-human primate research. In fact, most non-human primate neurophysiological research relies on behavioural designs that share features of both description and experience-based choices. As a consequence, it is unclear whether the neural mechanisms discovered in non-human primate electrophysiology should be linked to description-based or experience-based decision-making processes. The picture is further complicated by additional methodological gaps between human and non-human primate neural research. After analysing these methodological challenges, we conclude proposing new lines of research to address them.

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