Biology subjects

Kool, W.

Publications and source records attributed to Kool, W..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Evidence for shallow cognitive maps in schizophrenia

Individuals with schizophrenia can have marked deficits in goal-directed decision making. Prominent theories differ in whether schizophrenia (SZ) affects the ability to exert cognitive control, or the motivation to exert control. An alternative explanation is that schizophrenia negatively impacts the formation of cognitive maps, the internal representations of the way the world is structured, necessary for the formation of effective action plans. That is, deficits in decision-making could also arise when goal-directed control and motivation are intact, but used to plan over ill-formed maps. Here, we test the hypothesis that individuals with SZ are impaired in the construction of cognitive maps. We combine a behavioral representational similarity analysis technique with a sequential decision-making task. This enables us to examine how relationships between choice options change when individuals with SZ and healthy age-matched controls build a cognitive map of the task structure. Our results indicate that SZ affects how people represent the structure of the task, focusing more on simpler visual features and less on abstract, higher-order, planning-relevant features. At the same time, we find that SZ were able to display similar performance on this task compared to controls, emphasizing the need for a distinction between cognitive map formation and changes in goal-directed control in understanding cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Distractor-specific control adaptation in multidimensional environments

Goal-directed behavior requires humans to constantly manage and switch between multiple, independent, and conflicting, sources of information. Conventional cognitive control tasks, however, only feature one task and one source of distraction. Therefore, it is unclear how control is allocated in multidimensional environments. To address this question, we developed a multi-dimensional task-set interference paradigm, in which people need to manage distraction from three independent dimensions. We use this task to test whether people adapt to prior conflict by enhancing task-relevant information or suppressing task-irrelevant information. Three experiments provided strong evidence for the latter hypothesis. Moreover, control adaptation was highly dimension-specific. Conflict from a given dimension only affected processing of that same dimension on subsequent trials, with no evidence for generalization. A new neural network model shows that our results can only be simulated when including multiple independent conflict-detector units. Our results call for an update to classic models of cognitive control, and their neurocomputational underpinnings.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Need for cognition moderates cognitive effort aversion

When making decisions, humans aim to maximize rewards while minimizing costs. The exertion of mental or physical effort has been proposed to be one those costs, translating into avoidance of behaviors carrying effort demands. This motivational framework also predicts that people should experience positive affect when anticipating demand that is subsequently avoided (i.e., a "relief effect"), but evidence for this prediction is scarce. Here, we follow up on a previous study (1) that provided some initial evidence that people more positively evaluated outcomes if it meant they could avoid performing an additional demanding task. However, the results from this study did not provide evidence that this effect was driven by effort avoidance. Here, we report two experiments that are able to do this. Participants performed a gambling task, and if they did not receive reward they would have to perform an orthogonal effort task. Prior to the gamble, a cue indicated whether this effort task would be easy or hard. We probed hedonic responses to the reward-related feedback, as well as after the subsequent effort task feedback. Participants reported lower hedonic responses for no-reward outcomes when high vs. low effort was anticipated (and later exerted). They also reported higher hedonic responses for reward outcomes when high vs. low effort was anticipated (and avoided). Importantly, this relief effect was smaller in participants with high need for cognition. These results suggest that avoidance of high effort tasks is rewarding, but that the size off this effect depends on the individual disposition to engage with and expend cognitive effort. They also raise the important question of whether this disposition alters the cost of effort per se, or rather offset this cost during cost-benefit analyses.

neuroscience↗