Integration of social cues and individual experiences during instrumental avoidance learning.

ABSTRACT: Learning to avoid harmful consequences can be a costly trial-and-error process. In such situations, social information can be leveraged to improve individual learning outcomes. Here, we investigated how participants used their own experiences and others' social cues to avoid harm. Participants made repeated choices between harmful and safe options, each with different probabilities of generating shocks, while also seeing the image of a social partner. Some partners made predictive gaze cues towards the harmful choice option while others cued an option at random, and did so using neutral or fearful facial expressions. We tested how learned social information about partner reliability transferred across contexts by letting participants encounter the same partner in multiple trial blocks whil

SUBMITTER: Parnamets P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7500672 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature