Punishment maximises the probability of our individual survival by reducing behaviours that cause us harm, and also sustains trust and fairness in groups essential for social cohesion. However, some ...individuals are more sensitive to punishment than others and these differences in punishment sensitivity have been linked to a variety of decision-making deficits and psychopathologies. The mechanisms for why individuals differ in punishment sensitivity are poorly understood, although recent studies of conditioned punishment in rodents highlight a key role for punishment contingency detection (Jean-Richard-Dit-Bressel et al., 2019). Here, we applied a novel ‘Planets and Pirates’ conditioned punishment task in humans, allowing us to identify the mechanisms for why individuals differ in their sensitivity to punishment. We show that punishment sensitivity is bimodally distributed in a large sample of normal participants. Sensitive and insensitive individuals equally liked reward and showed similar rates of reward-seeking. They also equally disliked punishment and did not differ in their valuation of cues that signalled punishment. However, sensitive and insensitive individuals differed profoundly in their capacity to detect and learn volitional control over aversive outcomes. Punishment insensitive individuals did not learn the instrumental contingencies, so they could not withhold behaviour that caused punishment and could not generate appropriately selective behaviours to prevent impending punishment. These differences in punishment sensitivity could not be explained by individual differences in behavioural inhibition, impulsivity, or anxiety. This bimodal punishment sensitivity and these deficits in instrumental contingency learning are identical to those dictating punishment sensitivity in non-human animals, suggesting that they are general properties of aversive learning and decision-making.
A cognitive pathway to punishment insensitivity Jean-Richard-Dit-Bressel, Philip; Lee, Jessica C; Liew, Shi Xian ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
04/2023, Letnik:
120, Številka:
15
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Individuals differ in their sensitivity to the adverse consequences of their actions, leading some to persist in maladaptive behaviors. Two pathways have been identified for this insensitivity: a ...motivational pathway based on excessive reward valuation and a behavioral pathway based on autonomous stimulus-response mechanisms. Here, we identify a third, cognitive pathway based on differences in punishment knowledge and use of that knowledge to suppress behavior. We show that distinct phenotypes of punishment sensitivity emerge from differences in what people learn about their actions. Exposed to identical punishment contingencies, some people (sensitive phenotype) form correct causal beliefs that they use to guide their behavior, successfully obtaining rewards and avoiding punishment, whereas others form incorrect but internally coherent causal beliefs that lead them to earn punishment they do not like. Incorrect causal beliefs were not inherently problematic because we show that many individuals benefit from information about why they are being punished, revaluing their actions and changing their behavior to avoid further punishment (unaware phenotype). However, one condition where incorrect causal beliefs were problematic was when punishment is infrequent. Under this condition, more individuals show punishment insensitivity and detrimental patterns of behavior that resist experience and information-driven updating, even when punishment is severe (compulsive phenotype). For these individuals, rare punishment acted as a "trap," inoculating maladaptive behavioral preferences against cognitive and behavioral updating.
Factors affecting information-seeking behaviour can be task-endogenous (e.g., probability of winning a gamble), or task-exogenous (e.g., personality trait measures). Various task-endogenous factors ...affecting non-instrumental information-seeking behaviour have been identified, but it is unclear how task-exogenous factors affect such behaviour, and if they interact with task-endogenous factors. In an online information seeking experiment (
N
= 279), we focus on the role that outcome probability, as a task-endogenous factor, has on information preferences. We find reliable preference for advance information on highly probable gains and low preference for highly probable losses. Comparisons with individual trait measures of information preference (e.g., intolerance of uncertainty scale, obsessive-compulsive inventory, information preferences scale) reveal minimal association between these task-exogenous factors with choice task performance. We also find minimal interaction between outcome probability and individual trait measures. Despite the choice task and trait measures purportedly tapping the same (or similar) construct, the absence of clear relationships ultimately suggests a multi-dimensional nature of information preference.
Models of human decision-making aim to simultaneously explain the similarity, attraction, and compromise effects. However, evidence that people show all three effects within the same paradigm has ...come from studies in which choices were averaged over participants. This averaging is only justified if those participants show qualitatively similar choice behaviors. To investigate whether this was the case, we repeated two experiments previously run by Trueblood (
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
,
19
(5), 962-968,
2012
) and Berkowitsch, Scheibehenne, and Rieskamp (
Journal of Experimental Psychology
,
143
(3), 1331–1348,
2014
). We found that individuals displayed qualitative differences in their choice behavior. In general, people did not simultaneously display all three context effects. Instead, we found a tendency for some people to show either the similarity effect or the compromise effect but not both. More importantly, many individuals showed strong dimensional biases that were much larger than any effects of context. This research highlights the dangers of averaging indiscriminately and the necessity for accounting for individual differences and dimensional biases in decision-making.
Investigations of information-seeking often highlight people's tendency to forgo financial reward in return for advance information about future outcomes. Most of these experiments use tasks in which ...reward contingencies are described to participants. The use of such descriptions leaves open the question of whether the opportunity to obtain such noninstrumental information influences people's ability to learn and represent the underlying reward structure of an experimental environment. In two experiments, participants completed a two-armed bandit task with monetary incentives where reward contingencies were learned via trial-by-trial experience. We find, akin to description-based tasks, that participants are willing to forgo financial reward to receive information about a delayed, unchangeable outcome. Crucially, however, there is little evidence this willingness to pay for information is driven by an inaccurate representation of the reward structure: participants' representations approximated the underlying reward structure regardless of the presence of advance noninstrumental information. The results extend previous conclusions regarding the intrinsic value of information to an experience-based domain and highlight challenges of probing participants' memories for experienced rewards.
The samples of evidence we use to make inferences in everyday and formal settings are often subject to selection biases. Two property induction experiments examined group and individual sensitivity ...to one type of selection bias: sampling frames - causal constraints that only allow certain types of instances to be sampled. Group data from both experiments indicated that people were sensitive to the effects of such frames, showing narrower generalization when sample instances were selected because they shared a target property (property sampling) than when instances were sampled because they belonged to a particular group (category sampling). Group generalization patterns conformed to the predictions of a Bayesian model of property induction that incorporates a selective sampling mechanism. In each experiment, however, there was considerable individual variation, with a nontrivial minority showing little sensitivity to sampling frames. Experiment 2 examined correlates of frames sensitivity. A composite measure of working memory capacity predicted individual sensitivity to sampling frames. These results have important implications for current debates about people's ability to factor sample selection mechanisms into their inferences and for the development of formal models of inductive inference.
Standard theories suggest that humans should seek information only when it can help them make better decisions. However, recent work suggests that people choose to seek information even when it ...cannot influence the outcome of a choice. Across three experiments, we examined how this preference for non‐instrumental information was related to the risk, regret, and rejoice associated with different choices. Experiment 1 examined how risk preference informed the appetite for non‐instrumental information and tested how risk and information preference in a gamble‐task related to the desire for knowledge across a range of hypothetical real‐world scenarios. In Experiment 2, we tested how risk, operationalized as variance, related to non‐instrumental information seeking when allowing participants to mentally simulate the potential outcomes of gambles. In Experiment 3, we provided explicit feedback about forgone options, intending to make the potential for regret or rejoice more salient. Taken together, our results show a consistent appetite for information that was robust to changes across all experimental manipulations. We found some evidence of a positive correlation between the desire for knowledge and the level of anticipated regret (Experiment 1), but overall, our data appear more consistent with the idea that non‐instrumental information seeking is driven by a general aversion to uncertainty than by an attempt to regulate specific future emotions.
Proposed psychological mechanisms generating noninstrumental information seeking in humans can be broadly categorized into two competing accounts: the maximization of anticipating rewards versus an ...aversion to uncertainty. We compare three separate formalizations of these theories on their ability to track the dependency of information-seeking behavior on increasing levels of cue-outcome delay as well as their sensitivity to outcome valence. Across three experiments using a variety of different stimuli, we observe a flat to monotonically increasing pattern of delay dependency and minimal evidence of sensitivity to outcome valence--patterns which are better predicted, qualitatively and quantitatively, by an uncertainty aversion information model.
Chest radiographs (CXRs) are widely used for the screening and management of COVID-19. This article describes the radiographic features of COVID-19 based on an initial national cohort of patients.
...This is a retrospective review of swab-positive patients with COVID-19 who were admitted to four different hospitals in Singapore between 22 January and 9 March 2020. Initial and follow-up CXRs were reviewed by three experienced radiologists to identify the predominant pattern and distribution of lung parenchymal abnormalities.
In total, 347 CXRs of 96 patients were reviewed. Initial CXRs were abnormal in 41 (42.7%) out of 96 patients. The mean time from onset of symptoms to CXR abnormality was 5.3 ± 4.7 days. The predominant pattern of lung abnormality was ground-glass opacity on initial CXRs (51.2%) and consolidation on follow-up CXRs (51.0%). Multifocal bilateral abnormalities in mixed central and peripheral distribution were observed in 63.4% and 59.2% of abnormal initial and follow-up CXRs, respectively. The lower zones were involved in 90.2% of initial CXRs and 93.9% of follow-up CXRs.
In a cohort of swab-positive patients, including those identified from contact tracing, we found a lower incidence of CXR abnormalities than was previously reported. The most common pattern was ground-glass opacity or consolidation, but mixed central and peripheral involvement was more common than peripheral involvement alone.
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