Behrens Timothy E J, Hunt Laurence T, Woolrich Mark W, Rushworth Matthew F S
FMRIB Centre, University of Oxford, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford OX3 9DU, UK.
Nature. 2008 Nov 13;456(7219):245-9. doi: 10.1038/nature07538.
Our decisions are guided by information learnt from our environment. This information may come via personal experiences of reward, but also from the behaviour of social partners. Social learning is widely held to be distinct from other forms of learning in its mechanism and neural implementation; it is often assumed to compete with simpler mechanisms, such as reward-based associative learning, to drive behaviour. Recently, neural signals have been observed during social exchange reminiscent of signals seen in studies of associative learning. Here we demonstrate that social information may be acquired using the same associative processes assumed to underlie reward-based learning. We find that key computational variables for learning in the social and reward domains are processed in a similar fashion, but in parallel neural processing streams. Two neighbouring divisions of the anterior cingulate cortex were central to learning about social and reward-based information, and for determining the extent to which each source of information guides behaviour. When making a decision, however, the information learnt using these parallel streams was combined within ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that human social valuation can be realized by means of the same associative processes previously established for learning other, simpler, features of the environment.
我们的决策受从环境中获取的信息引导。这些信息可能来自个人的奖励体验，也可能来自社会伙伴的行为。人们普遍认为，社会学习在机制和神经实现方面与其他形式的学习不同；人们常常认为它与诸如基于奖励的联想学习等更简单的机制相互竞争，以驱动行为。最近，在社会交流过程中观察到的神经信号让人联想到在联想学习研究中看到的信号。在这里，我们证明社会信息可能是通过与基于奖励的学习相同的联想过程来获取的。我们发现，在社会和奖励领域进行学习的关键计算变量是以类似的方式处理的，但在并行的神经处理流中。前扣带回皮层的两个相邻区域对于学习基于社会和奖励的信息以及确定每种信息源对行为的引导程度至关重要。然而，在做出决策时，使用这些并行流学到的信息会在腹内侧前额叶皮层中进行整合。这些发现表明，人类的社会价值评估可以通过先前为学习环境的其他更简单特征而建立的相同联想过程来实现。
