Karolinska Institutet.
Emotion. 2015 Oct;15(5):668-76. doi: 10.1037/emo0000075. Epub 2015 Apr 20.
Humans and nonhuman primates preferentially learn to fear and avoid archetypical fear-relevant stimuli. Yet how these learning biases influence adaptive behavior, the basic mechanistic underpinnings of these biases, and how they interact with learning experiences during the life span of an individual remain unknown. To study this, we investigated how 4 classes of fear-relevant stimuli (snakes, threatening in-group faces, racial out-group faces, and guns) influenced adaptive behavior. We showed that stimulus-driven biases have a dramatic influence that can either promote or corrupt adaptive behavior depending on how a bias relates to the environment. We quantified and compared the effects of different fear-relevant stimuli on instrumental behavior using a computational reinforcement learning model that formalized the idea that the bias reflects competition between an instrumental and a Pavlovian valuation system. These results were further clarified by 2 independent rating studies showing that perceived danger of the stimuli corresponded well with their influence on adaptive behavior.
人类和非人类灵长类动物更倾向于学习恐惧和回避典型的与恐惧相关的刺激。然而，这些学习偏见如何影响适应性行为、这些偏见的基本机制基础，以及它们如何与个体生命周期中的学习经验相互作用，仍然未知。为了研究这一点，我们调查了四类与恐惧相关的刺激（蛇、威胁性的同群体面孔、种族外群体面孔和枪支）如何影响适应性行为。我们表明，刺激驱动的偏见具有巨大的影响，它可以促进或破坏适应性行为，具体取决于偏见与环境的关系。我们使用一种计算强化学习模型来量化和比较不同与恐惧相关的刺激对工具行为的影响，该模型形式化了这样一种观点，即偏见反映了工具性和巴甫洛夫价值系统之间的竞争。这两个独立的评级研究进一步澄清了这些结果，这些研究表明，刺激的感知危险与它们对适应性行为的影响非常吻合。
