Tomlin Damon, Nedic Andrea, Prentice Deborah A, Holmes Philip, Cohen Jonathan D
Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, 1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway, Colorado Springs, CO, 80918, USA.
Princeton Consultants, New York, NY, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2017 Aug;17(4):784-808. doi: 10.3758/s13415-017-0512-1.
Decades of research have established that decision-making is dramatically impacted by both the rewards an individual receives and the behavior of others. How do these distinct influences exert their influence on an individual's actions, and can the resulting behavior be effectively captured in a computational model? To address this question, we employed a novel spatial foraging game in which groups of three participants sought to find the most rewarding location in an unfamiliar two-dimensional space. As the game transitioned from one block to the next, the availability of information regarding other group members was varied systematically, revealing the relative impacts of feedback from the environment and information from other group members on individual decision-making. Both reward-based and socially-based sources of information exerted a significant influence on behavior, and a computational model incorporating these effects was able to recapitulate several key trends in the behavioral data. In addition, our findings suggest how these sources were processed and combined during decision-making. Analysis of reaction time, location of gaze, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data indicated that these distinct sources of information were integrated simultaneously for each decision, rather than exerting their influence in a separate, all-or-none fashion across separate subsets of trials. These findings add to our understanding of how the separate influences of reward from the environment and information derived from other social agents are combined to produce decisions.
数十年的研究已证实，决策会受到个体获得的奖励以及他人行为的显著影响。这些不同的影响是如何对个体的行动施加作用的，以及由此产生的行为能否在计算模型中得到有效体现？为解决这个问题，我们采用了一种新颖的空间觅食游戏，其中三名参与者组成的小组试图在一个陌生的二维空间中找到最具奖励性的位置。随着游戏从一个阶段过渡到下一个阶段，关于其他小组成员的信息可用性会系统地变化，从而揭示来自环境的反馈和来自其他小组成员的信息对个体决策的相对影响。基于奖励和基于社会的信息来源都对行为产生了重大影响，并且纳入这些影响的计算模型能够概括行为数据中的几个关键趋势。此外，我们的研究结果表明了这些信息来源在决策过程中是如何被处理和整合的。对反应时间、注视位置和功能磁共振成像（fMRI）数据的分析表明，这些不同的信息来源在每个决策中是同时整合的，而不是在不同的试验子集中以单独的、全有或全无的方式施加影响。这些发现增进了我们对环境奖励的单独影响与来自其他社会主体的信息如何结合以产生决策的理解。
