Reinforcement Learning and Attention in Decision Making
Brief description of study
Reinforcement effects are a tenet of human decision-making under uncertainty, according to which people increase their risk-taking following a gain and decrease their risk-taking following a loss. This behavior reveals a change in expected value or utility, but there are different competing explanations for its cause. Some attribute the change in behavior to a change in belief about the probability of a successful outcome, others attribute it to a change in risk-taking attitude. The aim of this study is to identify the cause of dynamic risk-taking behavior and disambiguate between the two alternative explanations. The study combines behavioral measurements with functional MRI (fMRI) to uncover the neural mechanisms of decision making under uncertainty. The study is a single-visit observational neuroimaging study on a sample of healthy human adults. Subjects completing the behavioral portion of the study perform one session of approximately 60-90 minutes of behavioral experiments at a computer. Subjects participating in the fMRI portion perform one session of approximately 120 minutes, approximately half of which are spent in the scanner. The experiment consists of subjects performing, inside or outside of the scanner, a simple choice task during which they can bet money on uncertain outcomes. How information on the odds of winning is presented varies across trials within subject.
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