Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF24 4HQ, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences, Swansea University, Swansea SA28PP, United Kingdom.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 Jun 8;33(12):7930-7940. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhad088.
The survival and well-being of humans require solving the patch-switching problem: we must decide when to stop collecting rewards in a current patch and travel somewhere else where gains may be higher. Previous studies suggested that frontal regions are underpinned by several processes in the context of foraging decisions such as tracking task difficulty, and/or the value of exploring the environment. To dissociate between these processes, participants completed an fMRI patch-switching learning task inspired by behavioral ecology. By analyzing >11,000 trials collected across 21 participants, we found that the activation in the cingulate cortex was closely related to several patch-switching-related variables including the decision to leave the current patch, the encounter of a new patch, the harvest value, and the relative forage value. Learning-induced changes in the patch-switching threshold were tracked by activity within frontoparietal regions including the superior frontal gyrus and angular gyrus. Our findings suggest that frontoparietal regions shape patch-switching learning apart from encoding classical non-learning foraging processes. These findings provide a novel neurobiological understanding of how learning emerges neurocomputationally shaping patch-switching behavior with implications in real-life choices such as job selection and pave the way for future studies to probe the causal role of these neurobiological mechanisms.
我们必须决定何时停止在当前斑块中收集奖励，然后前往其他可能获得更高收益的地方。先前的研究表明，在觅食决策的背景下，额叶区域受到几个过程的支持，例如跟踪任务难度，和/或探索环境的价值。为了区分这些过程，参与者完成了一项受行为生态学启发的 fMRI 斑块切换学习任务。通过分析 21 名参与者收集的 >11,000 个试验，我们发现扣带皮层的激活与几个与斑块切换相关的变量密切相关，包括离开当前斑块的决定、遇到新斑块、收获值和相对觅食值。在前额顶叶区域（包括额上回和角回）内的活动跟踪了斑块切换阈值的学习诱导变化。我们的发现表明，额顶叶区域除了编码经典的非学习觅食过程外，还塑造了斑块切换学习。这些发现为学习如何在神经计算上出现并塑造斑块切换行为提供了新的神经生物学理解，这对现实生活中的选择（例如工作选择）具有启示意义，并为未来研究探索这些神经生物学机制的因果作用铺平了道路。
