Dissecting the neurocomputational bases of patch-switching

Zacharopoulos, George, Maio, Greg and Linden, David E. J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5638-9292 2023. Dissecting the neurocomputational bases of patch-switching. Cerebral Cortex 33 (12) , pp. 7930-7940. 10.1093/cercor/bhad088

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC)
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	1047-3211
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	28 March 2023
Date of Acceptance:	28 January 2023
Last Modified:	13 Jul 2023 16:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/158129

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item