Flexibility to contingency changes distinguishes habitual and goal-directed strategies in humans.

ABSTRACT: Decision-making in the real world presents the challenge of requiring flexible yet prompt behavior, a balance that has been characterized in terms of a trade-off between a slower, prospective goal-directed model-based (MB) strategy and a fast, retrospective habitual model-free (MF) strategy. Theory predicts that flexibility to changes in both reward values and transition contingencies can determine the relative influence of the two systems in reinforcement learning, but few studies have manipulated the latter. Therefore, we developed a novel two-level contingency change task in which transition contingencies between states change every few trials; MB and MF control predict different responses following these contingency changes, allowing their relative influence to be inferred. Additionall

SUBMITTER: Lee JJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5634647 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature