For decades, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been the focus of social neuroscience research, specifically regarding its role in competitive social decision-making. However, the distinct contributions of PFC subregions when making strategic decisions involving multiple types of information (social, non-social, and mixed information) remain unclear. This study investigates decision-making strategies (pure probability calculation vs. mentalizing) and their neural representations using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data collected during a two-person card...

Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, for example, the description “one meeting happened during another” could mean that one meeting started before the other ended, or it could mean that the meetings started and ended simultaneously. A recent theory posits that people mentally simulate descriptions of durational events by representing their starts and ends along a spatial axis, that is, an iconic representation of time. To draw conclusions from this iconic mental model, reasoners consciously scan it in the direction of earlier to later timepoints. The...

According to influential theories about mood, exposure to environments characterized by specific patterns of punishments and rewards could shape mood response to future stimuli. This raises the intriguing possibility that mood could be trained by exposure to controlled environments. The aim of the present study is to investigate experimental settings that increase resilience of mood to negative stimuli. For this study, a new task was developed where participants register their mood when rewards are added or subtracted from their score. The study was conducted online,...

From an early age, children need to gather information to learn about their environment. Deciding which knowledge to pursue can be difficult because information can serve several, sometimes competing, purposes. Here, we examine the developmental trajectories of such diverse information-seeking motives. Over five experiments involving 521 children (aged 4-12), we find that school-age children integrate three key factors into their information-seeking choices: whether information reduces uncertainty, is useful in directing action, and is likely to be positive. Choices...

Humans frequently engage in intrinsically rewarding activities (for example, consuming art, reading). Despite such activities seeming diverse, we show that sensitivity to intrinsic rewards is domain general and associated with mental health. In this cross-sectional study, participants online (N = 483) were presented with putative visual, cognitive and social intrinsic rewards as well as monetary rewards and neutral stimuli. All rewards elicited positive feelings (were ‘liked’), generated consummatory behaviour (were ‘wanted’) and increased the likelihood of the...

According to Bayesian models, both decisions and confidence are based on the same precision-weighted integration of prior expectations (“priors”) and incoming information (“likelihoods”). This assumes that priors are integrated optimally and equally in decisions and confidence, which has not been tested. In three experiments, we quantify how priors inform decisions and confidence. With a dual-decision task we create pairs of conditions that are matched in posterior information, but differ on whether the prior or likelihood is more informative. We find that priors are...

Contrary to classical economic theories, experimental findings show that people are not exclusively self-interested, rather, they have other-regarding preferences, such as fairness and reciprocity. Further, these social preferences are emotionally driven, and deliberative processes are required to implement ‘rational’ self-interested motives. Here, we aimed to enhance ‘rational’ self-interested behavior by enhancing the neuronal activity of the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC), a brain area associated with emotion regulation processes, using anodal...

Detecting unusual auditory stimuli is crucial for discovering potential threat. Locus coeruleus (LC), which coordinates attention, and amygdala, which is implicated in resource prioritization, both respond to deviant sounds. Evidence concerning their interaction, however, is sparse. Seeking to elucidate if human amygdala affects estimated LC activity during this process, we recorded pupillary responses during an auditory oddball and an illuminance change task, in a female with bilateral amygdala lesions (BG) and in n = 23 matched controls. Neural input in response...

Dopamine fundamentally contributes to reinforcement learning, but recent accounts also suggest a contribution to specific action selection mechanisms and the regulation of response vigour. Here, we examine dopaminergic mechanisms underlying human reinforcement learning and action selection via a combined pharmacological neuroimaging approach in male human volunteers (n = 31, within-subjects; Placebo, 150 mg of the dopamine precursor L-dopa, 2 mg of the D2 receptor antagonist Haloperidol). We found little credible evidence for previously reported beneficial effects...

Perceptual confidence has been an important topic recently. However, one key limitation in current approaches is that most studies have focused on confidence judgments made for single decisions. In three experiments, we investigate how these local confidence judgments relate and contribute to global confidence judgments, by which observers summarize their performance over a series of perceptual decisions. We report two main results. First, we find that participants exhibit more overconfidence in their local than in their global judgments of performance, an observation...

Charitable giving involves a complex economic and social decision because the giver expends resources for goods or services they will never receive. Although psychologists have identified numerous factors that influence charitable giving, there currently exists no unifying computational model of charitable choice. Here, we submit one such model, based within the strictures of Psychological Value Theory (PVT). In four experiments, we assess whether charitable giving is driven by the perceived Psychological Value of the recipient. Across all four experiments, we...

Exploration is an important part of decision making and is crucial to maximizing long-term reward. Past work has shown that people use different forms of uncertainty to guide exploration. In this study, we investigate the role of the pupil-linked arousal system in uncertainty-guided exploration. We measured participants’ pupil dilation (N = 48) while they performed a two- armed bandit task. Consistent with previous work, we found that people adopted a hybrid of directed, random and undirected exploration, which are sensitive to relative uncertainty, total...

In visual search tasks, negative features provide information about stimuli that can be excluded from search. It has been shown that these negative features help participants to locate the target, possibly by attentional suppression of stimuli sharing the negative feature. Attentional suppression is assumed to be reflected in an event-related potential, the PD component. To provide a further test of these assumptions, we presented the color of the distractor at the start of a trial and asked participants to find the other colored stimulus in the subsequent search...

This work investigates how people make judgments about the content of their visual working memory (VWM). Some studies on long-term memory suggest that people base those metacognitive judgments on the outcome of a retrieval attempt. In contrast, Son and Metcalfe (2005) observed that people identify poorly remembered items immediately, presumably by the lack of familiarity for the retrieval cue. We tested these two hypotheses in the context of metacognition in VWM. In three experiments, we investigated participants’ response behavior in a color reproduction task with a...

Research suggests that moral evaluations change during adulthood. Older adults (75+) tend to judge accidentally harmful acts more severely than younger adults do, and this age-related difference is in part due to the greater negligence older adults attribute to the accidental harmdoers. Across two studies (N = 254), we find support for this claim and report the novel discovery that older adults’ increased attribution of negligence, in turn, is associated with a higher perceived likelihood that the accident would occur. We propose that, because older adults perceive...

The visual input that the eyes receive usually contains temporally continuous information about unfolding events. Therefore, humans can accumulate knowledge about their current environment. Typical studies on scene perception, however, involve presenting multiple unrelated images and thereby render this accumulation unnecessary. Our study, instead, facilitated it and explored its effects. Specifically, we investigated how recently-accumulated prior knowledge affects gaze behavior. Participants viewed sequences of static film frames that contained several ‘context...

Evaluations of others’ generosity are critical for selecting quality social partners, yet the factors which systematically affect these evaluations and whether they vary across development are still relatively unclear. Here, we establish that two key dimensions adults and children (aged 4 to 7 years) consider are the cost associated with a giving action and the need of the recipient, through six pre-registered experiments with Canadian and U.S. American participants. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults’ and children’s third-party evaluations of generosity are...

Pavlovian influences impair instrumental learning. It is easier to learn to approach reward-predictive signals and avoid punishment-predictive cues than their contrary. Whether the interindividual variability in this Pavlovian influence is consistent across time has been examined by a number of recent studies and met with mixed results. Here we introduce an open-source, web-based instance of a well-established Go-NoGo paradigm for measuring Pavlovian influence. We closely replicated the previous laboratory-based results. Moreover, the interindividual differences in...

Capacities for abstract thinking and problem-solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in fact be contingent on human-specific modes of collaboration, dialogue, and shared attention. In an experimental study, we test the hypothesis that social interaction enhances cognitive processes of rule-induction, which in turn...

An increasing number of studies call into question the external validity of social preference games. In this paper, we show that these games have a low correlation with single pro-social behaviors in the field, but this correlation can be substantially increased by aggregating behaviors to reduce measurement error. We tracked people’s daily pro-social behaviors for 14 days using a day reconstruction method; the same people played three different social preference games on seven different occasions. We show that, as more pro-social behaviors and game rounds are...

Comparing a visual memory with new visual stimuli can bias memory content, especially when the new stimuli are perceived as similar. Perceptual comparisons of this kind may play a mechanistic role in memory updating and can explain how memories can become erroneous in daily life. To test this possibility, we investigated whether comparisons can produce other types of memory distortion beyond memory bias that are commonly implicated in erroneous memories (e.g., memory misattribution). We hypothesized that the type of memory distortion induced during a comparison depends...

Successful avoidance of recurrent threats depends on inferring threatening agents’ preferences and predicting their movement patterns accordingly. However, it remains largely unknown how the human brain achieves this, despite the fact that many natural threats are posed by complex, dynamic agents that act according to their own goals. Here, we propose that humans exploit an interactive cognitive map of the social environment to infer threatening agents’ preferences and also to simulate their future behavior, providing for flexible, generalizable avoidance strategies. We...

Persistence and perseverance, even in the face of great adversity, are admirable qualities. However, knowing when to stop pursuing something is as important as exerting effort toward attaining a goal. Howdo people decide when to persist and when to quit? Here, we design a novel task to study this question, in which people were given a finite number of opportunities to pursue stochastic rewards by selecting among a set of options that provide a reward each trial. At any time, if people were not satisfied with the option they had selected they could choose to abandon it...

Hallucinations are characterized by disturbances of perceptual processes involved in decision-making about environmental stimuli. Here, we examine whether cognitive and computational processes by which sensory information is integrated may offer insight into the perceptual mechanisms of hallucinatory symptoms. We used a multi-element perceptual averaging task in which observers made dichotomous judgments about the “average color” (red or blue) of an array of stimuli in trials that varied in the strength (mean) and reliability (variance) of the decision-relevant...

Expectations are often dynamic: sports fans know that expectations are rapidly updated as games unfold. Yet expectations have traditionally been studied as static. Here we present behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of sub-second changes in expectations using slot machines as a case study. In Study 1, we demonstrate that EEG signal before the slot machine stops varies based on proximity to winning. Study 2 introduces a behavioral paradigm to measure dynamic expectations via betting, and shows that expectation trajectories vary as a function of winning...

Devaluation of alcohol leads to reductions in alcohol choice and consumption; however, the cognitive mechanisms that underpin this relationship are not well-understood. In this study we applied a computational model of value-based decision-making (VBDM) to decisions made about alcohol and alcohol-unrelated cues following experimental manipulation of alcohol value. Using a pre-registered within-subject design, thirty-six regular alcohol consumers (≥14 UK units per week) completed a two-alternative forced choice task where they chose between two alcohol images (in one...

Older adults tend to be more prone to distraction compared to young adults and this age-related deficit has been attributed to a deficiency in inhibitory processing. However, recent findings challenge the notion that aging leads to global impairments in inhibition. To reconcile these mixed findings, we investigated how aging modulates multiple mechanisms of attentional control including goal-directed target orienting, proactive distractor suppression, attention capture, and reactive disengagement by tracking the timing and direction of eye movements. When engaged in...

Contrary to the law of less work, individuals with high levels of need for cognition and self-control tend to choose harder tasks more often. While both traits can be integrated into a core construct of dispositional cognitive effort investment, its relation to actual cognitive effort investment remains unclear. As individuals with high levels of cognitive effort investment are characterized by a high intrinsic motivation towards effortful cognition, they would be less likely to increase their effort based on expected payoff, but rather based on increasing demand. In...

Measuring individual differences in cognitive effort can be elusive as effort is a function of motivation and ability. We report six studies (N = 663) investigating the relationship of Need for Cognition and working memory capacity with three cognitive effort measures: demand avoidance in the Demand Selection Task, effort discounting measured as the indifference point in the Cognitive Effort Discounting paradigm, and rational reasoning score with items from the heuristic and bias literature. We measured perceived mental effort with the NASA task load index. The...

Across the lifespan, individuals frequently choose between exploiting known rewarding options or exploring unknown alternatives. A large body of work has suggested that children may explore more than adults. However, because novelty and reward uncertainty are often correlated, it is unclear how they differentially influence decision-making across development. Here, children, adolescents, and adults (ages 8-27 years, N = 122) completed an adapted version of a recently developed value-guided decision-making task that decouples novelty and uncertainty. In line with...

Humans are driven by an intrinsic motivation to learn, but the developmental origins of curiosity-driven exploration remain unclear. We investigated the computational principles guiding 4-year-old children’s exploration during a touchscreen game (N=102, F=49, M=53). Children guessed the location of characters that were hiding behind a hedge following predictable (yet noisy) patterns. Children could freely switch characters, which allowed us to quantify when they decided to explore something different and what they chose to explore. Bayesian modelling of...

Younger and older adults differ in their risky choices. Theoretical frameworks on human aging point to various cognitive and motivational factors that might underlie these differences. Using a novel computational model based on resource rationality, we find that the two age groups select qualitatively different strategies. Importantly, older adults did not use simpler strategies than younger adults, they did not select among fewer strategies, they did not make more errors, and they did not put more weight on cognitive costs. Instead, older adults selected strategies...

In a recent paper, Burton et al. claim that individuals update beliefs to a greater extent when learning an event is less likely compared to more likely than expected. Here, we investigate Burton’s et al.’s, findings. First, we show how Burton et al.’s data do not in fact support a belief update bias for neutral events. Next, in an attempt to replicate their findings, we collect a new data set employing the original belief update task design, but with neutral events. A belief update bias for neutral events is not observed. Finally, we highlight the statistical errors...

Objective: Near-misses are a structural characteristic of gambling products that can be engineered within modern digital games. Over a series of pre-registered experiments using an online slot machine simulation, we investigated the impact of near-miss outcomes, on subjective ratings (motivation, valence) and two behavioural measures (speed of gambling, bet size).Method: Participants were recruited using Prolific and gambled on an online 3-reel slot machine simulator that delivered a 1 in 3 rate of X-X-O near-misses. Study 1 measured trial-by-trial subjective ratings of...

Implicit statistical learning, whereby predictable relationships between stimuli are detected without conscious awareness, is important for language acquisition. However, while this process is putatively implicit, it is often assessed using measures that require explicit reflection and conscious decision making. Here, we conducted three experiments combining an artificial grammar learning paradigm with a serial reaction time (SRT-AGL) task, to measure statistical learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies implicitly, without conscious decision making....

Both the experimental and the psychometric investigation of the WM capacity limit depend critically on the assumption that performance in our tests of WM reflects that capacity limit to a good approximation. Most tasks to measure WM rely on testing memory after a short time during which participants are asked to maintain information in WM. In these tests, episodic long-term memory is likely to also lay down a trace of the memory set. Therefore, participants can draw on two sources of information when memory is tested, making it difficult to separate the contributions of...

Individual differences in the ability to control attention are correlated with a wide range of important outcomes, from academic achievement and job performance to health behaviors and emotion regulation. Nevertheless, the theoretical nature of attention control as a cognitive construct has been the subject of heated debate, spurred on by psychometric issues that have stymied efforts to reliably measure differences in the ability to control attention. For theory to advance, our measures must improve. We introduce three efficient, reliable, and valid tests of attention...

The notion that humans avoid effortful action is one of the oldest and most persistent in psychology. Influential theories of effort propose that effort valuations are made according to a cost-benefit trade-off: we tend to invest mental effort only when the benefits outweigh the costs. While these models provide a useful conceptual framework, the affective components of effort valuation remain poorly understood. Here, we examined whether primitive components of affective response-positive and negative valence, captured via facial electromyography (fEMG)-can be used to...

Evidence regarding unaware differential fear conditioning in humans is mixed and even less is known about the effects of contingency awareness on appetitive conditioning. Phasic pupil dilation responses (PDR) might be more sensitive for capturing implicit learning than other measures, such as skin conductance responses (SCR). Here, we report data from two delay conditioning experiments utilizing PDR (alongside SCR and subjective assessments) to investigate the role of contingency awareness in aversive and appetitive conditioning. In both experiments, valence of...

Perception of time is not always veridical; rather, it is subjected to distortions. One such compelling distortion is that the duration of regularly spaced intervals is often overestimated. One account suggests that excitatory phases of neural entrainment concomitant with such stimuli play a major role. However, assessing the correlation between the power of entrained oscillations and time dilation has yielded inconclusive results. In this study, we evaluated whether phase characteristics of neural oscillations impact time dilation. For this purpose, we entrained 10-Hz...

Reduced tendency to engage in potentially rewarding activities is a hallmark of depression. The present study investigated the role of future expectancy biases in depression-linked behavioural choice, in participants varying in self-reported depression symptoms (dysphoria). A novel laboratory paradigm was developed to test the hypotheses that the degree to which higher dysphoria is associated with reduced tendency to engage in a potentially rewarding activity is dependent on the presence of negative biases in the expected outcomes of activity engagement. Specifically,...

Visuospatial attention is not a monolithic process and can be divided into different functional systems. In this framework, exogenous attention reflects the involuntary orienting of attention resources following a salient event, whereas endogenous attention corresponds to voluntary orienting based on the goals and intentions of individuals. Previous work shows that these attention processes map onto distinct functional systems, yet evidence suggests that they are not fully independent. In the current work, we investigated the differential and overlapping effects of...

Base rate neglect refers to the well-documented tendency for people to primarily rely on diagnostic information to identify event probabilities while discounting information about relative probabilities (base rates). It is often postulated that using base rate information requires some form of working memory intensive processes. However, recent studies have put this interpretation into doubt, showing that rapid judgments can also lead to base rate use. Here we examine the idea that base rate neglect can be explained by the degree of attention paid to diagnostic...

Sense of agency is the subjective feeling of being in control of one’s actions and their effects. Many studies have elucidated the cognitive and sensorimotor processes that drive this experience. However, less is known about how sense of agency influences flexible cognitive and motor control. Here, we investigated the effect of sense of agency on subsequent action regulation using a modified Go/No-Go task. In Experiment 1, we modulated participants’ sense of agency by varying the occurrence of action outcomes (present vs. absent) both locally on a trial-by-trial...

The role of the heart in the experience of time has been long theorized but empirical evidence is scarce. Here, we examined the interaction between fine-grained cardiac dynamics and the momentary experience of subsecond intervals. Participants performed a temporal bisection task for brief tones (80-188 ms) synchronized with the heart. We developed a cardiac Drift-Diffusion Model (cDDM) that embedded contemporaneous heart rate dynamics into the temporal decision model. Results revealed the existence of temporal wrinkles-dilation or contraction of short intervals-in...

Motivation influences goals, decisions, and memory formation. Imperative motivation links urgent goals to actions, narrowing the focus of attention and memory. Conversely, interrogative motivation integrates goals over time and space, supporting rich memory encoding for flexible future use. We manipulated motivational states via cover stories for a reinforcement learning task: The imperative group imagined executing a museum heist, whereas the interrogative group imagined planning a future heist. Participants repeatedly chose among four doors, representing different...

The study of individual experience during the performance of a psychological task using a phenomenological approach is a relatively new area of research. The aim of this paper was to combine first- and third-person approaches to investigate whether the strategies individuals use during a working memory task are associated with specific task conditions, whether the strategies combine to form stable patterns, and whether the use of specific strategies is related to task accuracy. Thirty-one participants took part in an experiment in which they were instructed to remember...

AbstractHuman generalization research aims to understand the processes underlying the transfer of prior experiences to new contexts. Generalization research predominantly relies on descriptive statistics, assumes a single generalization mechanism, interprets generalization from mono-source data, and disregards individual differences. Unfortunately, such an approach fails to disentangle various mechanisms underlying generalization behaviour and can readily result in biased conclusions regarding generalization tendencies. Therefore, we combined a computational model with...

Humans are remarkably efficient at decision-making, even in “open-ended’’ problems where the set of possible actions is too large for exhaustive evaluation. Our success relies, in part, on efficient processes of calling to mind and considering the right candidate actions for evaluation. When this process fails, however, the result is a kind of cognitive puzzle in which the value of a solution or action would be obvious as soon as it is considered, but never gets considered in the first place. Recently, machine learning (ML) architectures have attained or even exceeded...

Our perception does not depend exclusively on the immediate sensory input. It is also influenced by our internal predictions derived from prior observations and the temporal regularities of the environment, which can result in choice history biases. However, the mechanisms facilitating this flexible use of prior information to predict the future are unclear. Prior information may offset evidence accumulation independently of the current sensory input, or it may modulate the weight of current sensory input based on its consistency with the expectation. To address this...