Summary: Some individuals rely heavily on visual and sound cues when making decisions, and this sensitivity can lead to persistent maladaptive choices. When cue–outcome associations shift, these individuals struggle to update their beliefs, continuing to follow outdated signals even when doing so becomes risky.
The study reveals that heightened cue-driven learning may make people more vulnerable to harmful decision patterns commonly seen in addiction, compulsive disorders, and anxiety. The findings highlight how subtle environmental cues can exert outsized influence on behavior and why some people find it harder to break away from detrimental habits.
Key Facts:
- Cue Sensitivity: Some people depend on surrounding visual or auditory cues more heavily when making decisions.
- Poor Belief Updating: These individuals struggle to adjust when cues begin predicting worse or riskier outcomes.
- Maladaptive Patterns: This difficulty in unlearning associations may help explain compulsive behaviors and addictive decision loops.
Source: SfN
When people learn that surrounding visuals and sounds may signify specific choice outcomes, these cues can become guides for decision making.
For people with compulsive disorders, addictions, or anxiety, the associations between cues and choice outcomes can eventually promote poor decisions as they come to favor or avoid cues in a more biased manner.
Giuseppe di Pellegrino, from the University of Bologna, led a study to explore associative learning and maladaptive decision making in people.
As reported in their Journal of Neuroscience paper, the researchers discovered that some people rely on surrounding cues to make decisions more than others.
Furthermore, these individuals may have a harder time updating their beliefs and unlearning these associations when the cues change to signify riskier outcomes. This leads to more disadvantageous decision making that persists over time.
According to the researchers, this work suggests that some people have stronger cue sensitivity and less of an ability to update their beliefs about cues than others.
The researchers aim to continue exploring associative learning in patient populations and probing whether harmful decision patterns—which characterize addictions, compulsive disorders, and anxiety—are more likely in those with heightened sensitivity to visuals and sounds that guide their choices.
Key Questions Answered:
A: They have stronger associative learning responses, causing them to let surrounding cues guide choices more than internal reasoning.
A: These individuals struggle to update their beliefs, continuing to follow the cues even when they no longer lead to good outcomes.
A: Heightened cue reactivity and poor belief updating can create rigid decision loops similar to those seen in compulsive or addictive behavior.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this neuroscience research news
Author: SfN Media
Source: SfN
Contact: SfN Media – SfN
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Reduced Pavlovian Value Updating Alters Decision-Making in Sign-Trackers” by Giuseppe di Pellegrino et al. Journal of Neuroscience
Abstract
Reduced Pavlovian Value Updating Alters Decision-Making in Sign-Trackers
Successful reward-guided behavior relies not only on learning actions to obtain rewards but also on learning cues that predict the reward, which motivate and prepare the animal to pursue and consume it.
Although these two types of learning-instrumental learning and Pavlovian conditioning-have been extensively studied, it remains unclear how the brain updates and arbitrates between these systems, especially when Pavlovian signals are irrelevant to decision making.
To address this, we used eye-tracking, pupillometry, and computational modeling in a Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer task with 60 humans (30 females), consisting of three phases: the Pavlovian phase (learning conditioned stimulus-outcome associations), the instrumental phase (learning response-outcome associations), and the transfer phase (testing Pavlovian bias on instrumental responses).
Using this approach, we aimed to identify different types of learners and their strategies, especially how individual differences in sign-trackers versus goal-trackers influence Pavlovian bias.
To that end, we used eye gaze data to categorize participants as sign- or goal-trackers, and found that although both groups learned the task, sign-trackers’ performance was lower when exposed to Pavlovian cues, as they favored options based on their cue-outcome associations.
Fitting data with multiple computational models revealed that participants dynamically arbitrated between values estimated through Pavlovian and instrumental systems. Importantly, lower performance in sign-trackers was due to slower updating of Pavlovian cue values during the transfer phase, not overweighting of Pavlovian cue values relative to instrumental action values.
Overall, our study offers a computational framework for understanding inflexible decision making and potential interventions for disorders marked by maladaptive cue reactivity.
