Explicit knowledge of task structure is a primary determinant of human model-based action

• Autor(a) principal: Castro-Rodrigues, Pedro
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Akam, Thomas, Snorasson, Ivar, Camacho, Marta, Paixão, Vitor, Maia, Ana, Barahona-Corrêa, J. Bernardo, Dayan, Peter, Simpson, H. Blair, Costa, Rui M., Oliveira-Maia, Albino J.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/41275

Explicit information obtained through instruction profoundly shapes human choice behaviour. However, this has been studied in computationally simple tasks, and it is unknown how model-based and model-free systems, respectively generating goal-directed and habitual actions, are affected by the absence or presence of instructions. We assessed behaviour in a variant of a computationally more complex decision-making task, before and after providing information about task structure, both in healthy volunteers and in individuals suffering from obsessive-compulsive or other disorders. Initial behaviour was model-free, with rewards directly reinforcing preceding actions. Model-based control, employing predictions of states resulting from each action, emerged with experience in a minority of participants, and less in those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Providing task structure information strongly increased model-based control, similarly across all groups. Thus, in humans, explicit task structural knowledge is a primary determinant of model-based reinforcement learning and is most readily acquired from instruction rather than experience.