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Trading off the cost of conflict against expected rewards

View ORCID ProfileNura Sidarus, View ORCID ProfileStefano Palminteri, View ORCID ProfileValérian Chambon
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/412809
Nura Sidarus
1Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’Études Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, Paris, France
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  • For correspondence: nura.sidarus@ens.fr
Stefano Palminteri
2Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, Département d’Études Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, INSERM, PSL University, Paris, France
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Valérian Chambon
1Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’Études Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, Paris, France
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Abstract

Value-based decision-making involves trading off the cost associated with an action against its expected reward. Research has shown that both physical and mental effort constitute such subjective costs, biasing choices away from effortful actions, and discounting the value of obtained rewards. Facing conflicts between competing action alternatives is considered aversive, as recruiting cognitive control to overcome conflict is effortful. Yet, it remains unclear whether conflict is also perceived as a cost in value-based decisions. The present study investigated this question by embedding irrelevant distractors (flanker arrows) within a reversal-learning task, with intermixed free and instructed trials. Results showed that participants learned to adapt their choices to maximize rewards, but were nevertheless biased to follow the suggestions of irrelevant distractors. Thus, the perceived cost of being in conflict with an external suggestion could sometimes trump internal value representations. By adapting computational models of reinforcement learning, we assessed the influence of conflict at both the decision and learning stages. Modelling the decision showed that conflict was avoided when evidence for either action alternative was weak, demonstrating that the cost of conflict was traded off against expected rewards. During the learning phase, we found that learning rates were reduced in instructed, relative to free, choices. Learning rates were further reduced by conflict between an instruction and subjective action values, whereas learning was not robustly influenced by conflict between one’s actions and external distractors. Our results show that the subjective cost of conflict factors into value-based decision-making, and highlights that different types of conflict may have different effects on learning about action outcomes.

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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 September 11, 2018.
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Trading off the cost of conflict against expected rewards
Nura Sidarus, Stefano Palminteri, Valérian Chambon
bioRxiv 412809; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/412809
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Trading off the cost of conflict against expected rewards
Nura Sidarus, Stefano Palminteri, Valérian Chambon
bioRxiv 412809; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/412809

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