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The stability flexibility tradeoff and the dark side of detail

View ORCID ProfileMatthew R. Nassar, View ORCID ProfileVanessa Troiani
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.03.894014
Matthew R. Nassar
1Department of Neuroscience; Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University, Providence RI, USA 02912-1821
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  • For correspondence: matthew_nassar@brown.edu
Vanessa Troiani
2Geisinger-Bucknell Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute Lewisburg PA, USA
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Abstract

Learning in dynamic environments requires integrating over stable fluctuations to minimize the impact of noise (stability) but rapidly responding in the face of fundamental changes (flexibility). Achieving one of these goals often requires sacrificing the other to some degree, producing a stability-flexibility tradeoff. Individuals navigate this tradeoff in different ways, with some people learning rapidly (emphasizing flexibility) and others relying more heavily on historical information (emphasizing stability). Despite the prominence of such individual differences in learning tasks, the degree to which they relate to broader characteristics of real-world behavior or pathologies has not been well explored. Here we relate individual differences in learning behavior to self-report measures thought to collectively capture characteristics of the Autism spectrum. We show that that young adults who learn most slowly tend to integrate more effective samples into their beliefs about the world making them more robust to noise (more stability), but are more likely to integrate information from previous contexts (less flexibility). We show that individuals who report paying more attention to detail tend to use high flexibility and low stability information processing strategies. We demonstrate the robustness of this inverse relationship between attention to detail and formation of stable beliefs in a heterogeneous population of children that includes a high proportion of Autism diagnoses. Together, our results highlight that attention to detail reflects an information processing policy that comes with a substantial downside, namely the ability to integrate data to overcome environmental noise.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted January 03, 2020.
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The stability flexibility tradeoff and the dark side of detail
Matthew R. Nassar, Vanessa Troiani
bioRxiv 2020.01.03.894014; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.03.894014
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The stability flexibility tradeoff and the dark side of detail
Matthew R. Nassar, Vanessa Troiani
bioRxiv 2020.01.03.894014; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.03.894014

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