Department of Psychobiology, Universitat de València, Spain.
Department of Psychobiology, Universitat de València, Spain.
Physiol Behav. 2022 Nov 1;256:113953. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2022.113953. Epub 2022 Aug 27.
Stress alters decision-making by usually promoting risk-taking and reward-seeking, which could be advantageous in a context where risk is rewarded, such as the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). However, previous studies addressing this issue showed inconsistencies which could emerge from assessing decision-making as a single dimension. Our aim is to study through computational modelling how stress influences cognitive subprocesses of the decision-making during the BART. For this purpose, 94 healthy participants were submitted to BART, but only half were exposed to the virtual Trier Social Stress Test (TSST-VR). The Experimental-Weight Mean-Variance (EWMV) model was used to gain insight into the subprocesses involved in risk-taking during BART. Rather than reward-seeking, our results showed a pessimistic prior belief about the balloons bursting likelihood, and a lower risk preference in the stressed participants. This cautious attitude could be attributable to an alertness state promoted by stress. Yet, since risk is rewarded in BART, it could also evidence a maladaptive decision-making derived from learning difficulties and altered feedback-processing under stress.
压力通常通过促进冒险和寻求奖励来改变决策，这在风险得到回报的情况下可能是有利的，例如气球模拟风险任务 (BART)。然而，之前研究这一问题的研究显示，评估决策作为单一维度可能会出现不一致。我们的目的是通过计算建模来研究压力如何影响 BART 期间决策的认知子过程。为此，94 名健康参与者接受了 BART，但只有一半参与者暴露于虚拟特里尔社会压力测试 (TSST-VR) 中。实验权重均值方差 (EWMV) 模型用于深入了解 BART 中冒险行为所涉及的认知子过程。我们的结果表明，与寻求奖励不同，压力组参与者对气球爆裂可能性的先验信念悲观，风险偏好较低。这种谨慎的态度可能归因于压力引起的警觉状态。然而，由于 BART 中风险得到回报，这也可能表明在压力下学习困难和反馈处理改变导致的适应性决策能力下降。
