Brain meeting: Dr Nitzan Shahar
Credit-assignment to state-independent task representations
Brain meeting
Natural environments are feature-rich and only a subset of these features are considered to predict action-outcome associations. To enable accurate action-outcome predictions a decision maker is faced with a challenge, namely that only a portion of the information in the environment is predictive of a desired outcome. Here, we highlight the tendency of individuals to assign credit to outcome-irrelevant task representations. We demonstrate that value is assigned to these representations in a model-free and state-independent manner. We further show the association between these low-level value associations and a more sophisticated model-based system, and propose how model-free representations might be regulated according to a model of the environment. Finally, we suggest that a deficit in the regulation of outcome-irrelevant model-free associations might lead to behavioural abnormalities such as compulsive behaviour.
There will be coffee, tea and cake in the conservatory directly after the talk.
Dr Nitzan Shahar
Sagol School of Neuroscience Psychology Department Tel-Aviv University
Further information
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