Biology subjects

Liljeholm, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Liljeholm, M..

7 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Reward & Imitation in Social Conformity

Normative social conformity has been proposed to elicit a hedonic reward signal that is dissociable from informational inferences about decision outcomes. If present, such a signal should reinforce not just the decision that preceded it, but also any incidentally co-occurring stimulus features. Alternatively, normative conformity might reflect a non-hedonic imitation algorithm. Across two studies (n=359) we used a non-deceptive multi-participant gambling task in which trial-by-trial information was provided about the selections and monetary payoffs of two other participants facing the same, recurring, options in real time. Consistent with both accounts, and contrary to mere monetary maximization, the probability of staying with a losing option increased with the degree of decision unanimity. However, contrary to the social reward hypothesis, only monetary payoffs modulated the valence of incidental gambling stimuli. A prosocial framing did not significantly alter this pattern of results, which favors an imitative over a hedonic account of normative social conformity.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Charitability, Compulsion, & the Cost of Control

Human decision-makers have a well-established preference for controllable environments. We combined a hierarchical gambling task with cross-sectional administration of psychometric surveys and computational cognitive modeling, to assess whether this preference extends to contexts in which decision outcomes benefit others, specifically charitable organizations. In neurotypical individuals (n=100), there was a dramatic reduction in the preference for free choice across self- and charity-benefiting gambling contexts when freely chosen options yielded divergent outcome distributions - i.e., when free choice afforded control over decision outcomes. This selective modulation is consistent with a cost-benefit analysis, trading cognitive effort and controllability gains against the utilities of earning money for oneself vs. for a charity. When the same task was administered to individuals with self-reported obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; n=108) the preference for control over decision outcomes was preserved across self- and charity-benefiting contexts, consistent with a responsibility-OCD subtype and with an excessive subjective utility of control more generally.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Charitability, Compulsion, & the Cost of Control

Human decision-makers have a well-established preference for free choice. We used a hierarchical gambling task to assess whether this preference extends to environments in which decision outcomes benefit others, specifically charitable organizations. In neurotypical individuals (n=100), we found a reduction in the preference for free choice across self- and charity-benefiting environments when freely chosen options yielded divergent sensory outcome distributions, but not when the outcome distributions of available options were identical - i.e., only when free choice afforded instrumental control. In individuals with obsessive-compulsive traits (n=108) this pattern was reversed, suggesting an unchanged preference for control in charity-benefiting environments. Computational cognitive modeling confirmed a selective reduction in the subjective utility of instrumental control, dissociable from that of free choice, outcome divergence, and monetary reward maximization, in neurotypical individuals gambling for charities. We interpret these results as reflecting cost-benefit analyses weighing the deployment of cognitive effort against the value of control.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Abstinence from Substance Use & The Value of Control

Clinical criteria for substance-use disorder collectively specify a loss of instrumental control over consumption, yet little empirical work has addressed how substance use shapes the utility of agency in motivated behavior. We combined a hierarchical gambling task with cross-sectional substance-use surveys and computational cognitive modeling, to assess the preference for controllable environments in adult humans with self-reported abstinence, across psychostimulant, opioid, alcohol, and sedative use. For psychostimulants, the duration of abstinence strongly modulated the preference for control, without affecting the ability to maximize monetary payoffs. In contrast, for alcohol, the recency of use was more predictive of a preference for environments with divergent outcome distributions, regardless of whether those outcomes were controllable. No effects of abstinence were seen for sedatives. The selective effects of psychostimulant use on the value of control implicate the dopaminergic system in agency coding.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

Agency as Planning for Known Unknowns

The utility of a given experience, like interacting with a particular friend or tasting a particular food, fluctuates continually according to homeostatic and hedonic principles. Consequently, to maximize reward, an individual must be able to escape or attain outcomes as preferences change, by switching between actions. Recent work on human and artificial intelligence has defined such flexible instrumental control in information theoretic terms and postulated that it may serve as a reward surrogate. Another possibility, however, is that the adaptability afforded by flexible control is tacitly implemented by planning for dynamic changes in outcome values. In the current study, an expected utility model that computes decision values over a range of possible monetary gains and losses associated with sensory outcomes provided the best fit to behavioral choice data and performed best in terms of earned rewards. Moreover, consistent with previous work on perceived control and personality, individual differences in dimensional schizotypy were correlated with behavioral choice preferences in conditions with the greatest and lowest levels of flexible control. These results contribute to a growing literature on the role of instrumental control in goal-directed choice.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2018

Neural Correlates of Causal Confounding

As scientists, we are keenly aware that if putative causes perfectly co-vary, the independent influence of neither can be discerned - a \"no confounding\" constraint on inference, fundamental to philosophical and statistical perspectives on causation. Intriguingly, a substantial behavioral literature suggests that naive human reasoners, adults and children, are tacitly sensitive to causal confounding. Here, a combination of fMRI and cognitive computational modeling was used to investigate neural substrates mediating such sensitivity. While being scanned, participants observed and judged the influences of various putative causes with confounded or non-confounded, deterministic or stochastic, influences. During judgments requiring generalization of causal knowledge from a feedback-based learning context to a transfer probe, activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) was better accounted for by a Bayesian causal model, sensitive to both confounding and stochasticity, than a purely error-driven algorithm, sensitive only to stochasticity. Implications for the detection and estimation of distinct forms of uncertainty, and for a neural mediation of domain general constraints on causal induction, are discussed.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Chemogenetic inhibition of ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons or their inputs to the nucleus accumbens disrupts cue-triggered reward seeking but not reward taking

Reward-paired cues stimulate reward-seeking behavior through a combination of motivational and cognitive processes. We used pathway-specific chemogenetic inhibition of dopamine neurons to determine their role in the cue-elicited reward seeking, and applied a novel analytic approach to assay cue-induced changes in reward expectancy. Inhibiting ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons abolished cue-induced reward seeking but not reward retrieval, indicating that this pathway modulates response vigor but not reward expectancy. Locally inhibiting dopamine inputs to nucleus accumbens also disrupted cue-elicited reward seeking but not retrieval. Interestingly, the suppression produced by this treatment was greater in rats that responded to cues with exploratory reward seeking, without attempting to retrieve reward, than in rats exhibiting complete bouts of seeking with retrieval, indicating that individuals differ in their reliance on a dopamine-mediated motivational process. These findings shed new light on the behavioral and neural mechanisms of adaptive and compulsive forms of cue-motivated behavior.

neuroscience↗