Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. de Berker A.O., Rutledge RB, Mathys C, Marshall L, Cross GF, Dolan RJ, Bestmann S. This may explain why countries with lower inequality are on average happier.Ħ. Here we expand this work into the social domain – how does your happiness depend upon what happens to somebody else? We find that inequality tends to make people unhappy, and that people who react more strongly to inequality tend to be more generous. Why? In previous work, my collaborator Robb Rutledge showed that a simple equation could predict how happiness changes from moment to moment. Nature Communications (OPEN Access) doi:10.1038/ncomms11825Ĭoverage in Discover Magazine, i News, The Daily Mail, Wired, PsychCentral, Complex.Īccessible summary: Most of us experience fluctuations in happiness throughout the day. The social contingency of momentary subjective well-being. Rutledge RB*, de Berker AO*, Espenhahn S, Dayan P, Dolan RJ (2016). However, when they had to learn not to take an action, stressed people behaved the same way as non-stressed people, suggesting that stress specifically affects learning to act.ĥ. Here we found that acute stress (people submerging their hands in ice-cold water for 3 minutes) made people worse at learning to take actions in order to gain monetary rewards or avoid losing money. We know that stress affects how people learn, but the details are still somewhat murky. Nature Scientific Reports (OPEN Access) doi:10.1038/srep29816Īccessible summary: Stress is an inescapable feature of most of our lives. Acute stress selectively impairs learning to act. de Berker A.O.*, Tirole M.*, Rutledge R.B., Cross G.F., Dolan RJ, Bestmann S. To do this, we used a Bayesian learning model developed previously by Chris Mathys and colleagues.Ĥ.
We found that altering levels of noradrenaline changed how people learned about changes in the environment, whilst interfering with acetylcholine impacted whether people interpreted unexpected events as random or meaningful. In this study we gave participants low doses of drugs which affect different neurotransmitter systems, and assessed whether their learning was affected. (2016). Pharmacological Fingerpints of Contextual Uncertainty.Īccessible summary: The brain keeps track of different forms of uncertainty during learning, and these different forms are thought to be underpinned by different neurochemical systems.
Marshall L*, Mathys C*, Ruge D, de Berker AO, Dayan P, Stephan K, Bestmann S. This suggests that these kind of measurements could be useful for tracking the development of diseases, and potentially for testing new treatments.ģ. We showed that different people display very different patterns of brainwaves when they make a simple movement, and that these patterns are strong and stable over time. (2016).Movement-related beta oscillations show high intra-individual reliabilityĪccessible summary: Here we used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure electrical activity generated by the brain during movement. Espenhahn S, de Berker AO, van Wijk BCM, Rossiter HE, Ward NS. We think this approach, which we term ‘computational neurostimulation’, is a promising way to understand how brain stimulation affects behaviour.Ģ. Sure enough, brain stimulation (transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, tDCS) reliably manipulated the repetition bias. To test this, we conducted an experiment in human participants. Previous biophysical modelling suggests that transcranial electrical stimulation produces a weak current in the brain, and by implementing this in our model we find that the left-over activity is increased. The model predicts that if we amplify this left-over activity, the bias should increase. Here we use a neural network model to explain this effect, showing that ‘left-over’ activity from the previous choice can effect the next one. Bonaiuto J, de Berker AO, Bestmann S (2016). Response repetition biases in human perceptual decisions are explained by activity decay in competitive attractor modelsĪccessible summary: Humans display a bias to repeat recent decisions – so if you chose the right option on the previous choice, you’re more likely to choose the right one this time. For an up-to-date list of publications, see my Google Scholar.
0 kommentar(er)
