Thinking, Judgement, and Decision Making

Question 1

What is Gastrophysics?

Answer 1

○ Charles spence argues that food is not just experienced by using the sense of taste
○ The multisensory integration from all other senses will directly influence what food tastes like
○ This means other sensory information will not only change the overall experience (which is also important), but directly chance the experienced taste of the food
○ Spence calls the field investigating this multisensory interplay “gastrophysics” (the name is borrowed from psychophysics, the field that investigates the relationship between objective qualities of stimuli and experienced sensory qualities

Question 2

Explain how sound impacts taste perceptions

Answer 2

• “sonic seasoning”
  
  • Matching the food with the sounds
  • But can you change the taste of food by adding sounds? Potentially use ‘sweet sounds’ that make the food sound sweeter

Question 3

Explain how the tongue impacts taste perceptions

Answer 3

• Basic tastes come from the tongue: sweet, sour, bitter, salty (maybe umami)
  
  • What about fruity, smoky, herbal, burnt, and others?
  • These are flavours, and they emerge when smell is added
    The classical tongue mapping is probably not true - there are relative differences, but great variability between people

Question 4

Explain how smell impacts taste perception

Answer 4

• Smell adds to the taste experience, but we do not realise this but ‘project’ the experience onto the tongue (‘oral referral’)
  
  • There is orthonasal (sniffing external aromas) and retronasal (aromatic odour is received through the back of the mouth into the back of the nose during food consumption)
  • Both contribute to the perception of taste (try to eat something with your nose closed)
  • The rich perception of aroma comes from the retronasal route
  • Can you create the right smell to compliment the food?
    ○ You should be able to add to the taste with certain smells
    ○ Infused the smoke with ‘forest smell’ to make the meal taste more earthy:

Question 5

How does vision impact taste perception?

Answer 5

• The brain is optimised for vision
  
  • Visual food cues are the most commonly used stimuli in our environment, probably because we’re hard-wired to respond to them so strongly
  • “Tasting” the colour?
  • People do have surprisingly similar ideas of how colours and taste qualities are associated
  • What happens if you expect a different taste because of the colour?
  • Adding ‘sweetness’ to a drink by getting the colour right?
  • Using differently coloured plates can change the taste experience
  • Using different shapes of plates may also impact on the taste experience - round plates make food taste sweeter and liked more
  • But findings do not necessarily replicate in the lab
  • Does it make a difference to your tastes experience how your latte is presented?
    ○ Yes it does
  • There are international competitions for latte art
  • People reported higher willingness to pay, expected to like it more, and for it to be less intense
  • In a real-world (but not well controlled) café experiment, willingness-to-pay differences were replicated, but not differences in linking
  • People expected to like coffee with a star shape art better, expected it to be less bitter and of a higher quaity
  • In a real tasting experiment perceived quality differences replicated

Question 6

Explain the wine experiment exploring how expectations can influence taste perception

Answer 6

• Some wines labelled differently:
  ○ Wine 1: $5 or $45
  ○ Wine 2: $10 or $90
  ○ Wine 3: $35
  
  • Participants rated taste pleasantness after tasting wines while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) conducted
  • People like the same wine significantly more when priced higher
    ○ So people liked the same wine more when it was said to be more expensive
    ○ In a follow up study 8 weeks later without price information, difference in the taste experience goes away
  • The price effect was also evident in neural activity differences in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a brain region involved in decision-making and integration of sensory experience
  • Several other brain regions were found, such as ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortext (dlPFC), which are involved in different aspects of decision-making and conflict detection/procession

Question 7

Are we the same ‘decision-makers’ after consuming food and drinks?

Answer 7

○ People were showed a cue (blue dot), that they knew indicated some reward (could be no reward, small, medium, or large), and the reward was a bit of juice
○ Then got them to press a button when they predicted the halfway point in a given time slot
○ Figured if people were getting big rewards, they would press it sooner because they would want it again
○ But actually, time estimates gets longer with larger juice rewards
○ People judged time intervals differently after consuming sweet, high-caloric juice
○ The effect disappears for a sweet but calorie-neutral solution, but also observed for a taste-neutral but high-caloric solution
§ So it is the calories that drives this response

Question 8

Do we make different decisions when we consume calories (even if not yet digested)?

Answer 8

Had a fake coin with different amounts that can be listed, you know it can have the potential for a maximum of 50c, but you don’t know how long you will have to wait to get that - test for patience. When is it the point that people just choose to go to the next trial?
In one condition, they gave participants water, and the other were given high-caloric liquid
○ Found that the probability for the decision to wait for monetary reward is reduced after consuming high caloric liquid relative to water
○ So people think they don’t have to wait because they have already consumed a high-calorie reward
* So these decisions that have nothing to do with food at all, can be influenced by your consumption

Question 9

Do we need to consciously think about big decisions? What happens when we ‘sleep on it’ and suddenly ‘know’ our decisions?

Answer 9

• Sometimes we seem to ‘just know’ the outcome: this is referred to as ‘unconscious thought’, or deliberation in the absence of conscious attention

Question 10

Describe Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT)

Answer 10

• Dijksterhuis and colleagues (2006) tested predictions of Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT):
  ○ Conscious decisions to follow rules ( “I don’t want to spend more than $10,000 on a car”)
  ○ Unconscious thought, however, is better when decisions are more complex, because the unconscious mind is not capacity-limited
  § Simple choices should be better when made with conscious thought, and complex decisions should benefit from unconscious thought
• Study 1: 4 conditions where participants were given either a simple problem (thinking of a car with 4 attributes), or a complex problem (thinking of a car with 12 attributes), paired with either conscious thought (thinking about it for 4 mins), or unconscious though (being distracted for 4 mins)
  ○ They found that when there are 4 attributes, people chose the better car in the conscious thought condition
  ○ With 12 attributes, better choices were made in the unconscious thought condition
  
  • In study 3, they asked people how satisfied they were with purchasse decisions for items of different complexity when they:
    ○ Thought about them (conscious thought)
    ○ Made spontaneous decisions (unconscious thought)
• in study 3, they found that participants were more satisfied with their conscious ourchase choices for simple problems (eg buying shampoo); but were more satisfied with their unconscious thoughts for more complex problems (eg buying a room or a plane ticket)
  
  • In study 4, they asked people, who did their shopping in two different shops (one that sells complex things and one that sells simple things) how much they thought about their purchase
    ○ A few weeks later, they conducted phone interviews and asked how satisfied they were with the products. Again, they found that people who made unconscious purhcase decisions were more satisfied with more complex purchases (eg from IKEA buying furniture). Whereas, conscious thinkers were more satisfied with their simple purchases (eg from Bijenkorf which sells cloths and kitchen accessories)

Question 11

Describe the effect of subtle cues in unconscious goal pursuit

Answer 11

• Study: Unconscious priming of the goal to achieve
  ○ Bargh and colleagues (2001) asked students to work on (seemingly unrelated) language puzzles
  ○ Some puzzles contained words related to achievement, while others did not
  § students who solved the achievement-word puzzles outperformed the others in a second puzzle
  § students who solved the achievement-word puzzles were also more persistent, and showed more flexibility in other tests
  
  • Other studies have shwon similar findings supporting the effect of subtle cues:
    ○ People become more competitive when seeing a leather briefcase on the desk in an office
    ○ People talk more softly when looking at a library picture on the wall
    ○ People clean their table more often when cleaning agent scent is in the air

Question 12

How does unconscious activation of a goal representation lead to goal pursuit?

Answer 12

• unconscious activation of a goal representation leads to preparation of action (motor preparation is often done unconsciously: ideas of the movement can already trigger the movement; primining of simple actions might activate respective neural programs) and detection of positive reward signal (rewards are also detected unconsciously: neural reward structures activated by subliminal rewarding cues like sex and food; eg task effort is higher when monetary reward was presented subliminally), both of which combined lead to goal pursuit.

-This suggests that we do not necessarily need consciousness for selecting goals

Question 13

Describe unconscious biases on decision-making (nudges)

Answer 13

• Besides decision processes potentially being initiated without consciousness, there are also influences of unconscious cues - or nudges - on decision processes
  
  • The effect of nudges can be understood in the context of evidence accumulation models (eg the Diffusion Decision Model - DDM)
  • The models have been applied to various decision problems and characterise at a conceptual level how we continuously sample information until reaching a ‘decision threshold’
  • The idea of nudges is that they bias the decision-making process
    ○ They might shift the starting point of the process towards one threshold
    § This means, because people are already primed towards the healthy option, the same processing of ‘pro-healthy’ information as before would be enough to reach the decision threshold for the salad
    § In this case, the nudge makes it more likely to make a decision for the healthy option
    ○ They might also shift the decision thresholds/boundaries
    ^In this example, the nudge might make people consider more information before reaching a decision
    ^In this second example, the nudge would secretively make the people consider less information for one of the options before making a decision`
  • Nudges might be more effective in influencing decisions, which are not under conscious control, as conscious control could counteract the nudges by decision threshold setting
  • Nudges might also impact on the rate at which information/evidence is sampled (often call drift rate)
    ○ For example, if the smell of the brownie biases you

Question 14

Are nudges ethical?

Answer 14

○ Should nudges only be used for ‘good goals’? Eg smoking prevention or healthy eating?
○ Should we give people all information instead of using nudging?
○ Are we ever in a ‘nudge free’ environment?
○ Even if there are no nudges in our environment at a given moment, is the internalised context (our memory) also a nudge?

Question 15

Describe Information for reward maximisation

Answer 15

• Classical perspective: Active information seeking should depend on the possibility to maximise rewards
  ○ Instrumental Valuation Theory
  
  • Humans are suboptimal in information processing and prone to biases
    ○ Eg Good-News-Bad-News effect; confirmation bias
  • If your team wins, you have always been ‘the expert’, but if your team loses, there were ‘exceptional circumstances’
  • There may be multiple reasons to actively seek out information, not only instrumentality
• eg biases of: Action (instrumental utility), Affect (hedonic utility), and cognition (cognitive utility) together (with individual differences) lead to information value, which leads to information seek/avoid response

Question 16

What is non-instrumental information

Answer 16

Monkeys strongly prefer informative cues (80-100%) about the amount of a reward, and they are willing to sacrifice rewards for such information

Question 17

Would we pay for watching a lottery, even though we can influence the outcome (and they tell us if we win anyway)?

Answer 17

Experimental task: would people accept a cost for watching the informative set of cards (indicative of winning a lottery) being successfully revealed?

-Found that people participants were willing to pay even though the information was ‘non-instrumental’
-Participants also accepted physical effort costs

Question 18

Does choosing your own lottery bias willingness to pay for non-instrumental information?

Answer 18

-Study found that choosing one’s own lottery increased confidence in winning: ‘Illusion of Control Effect (IOC)’

-Modelling results showed that choosing one’s lottery independently increased willingness to pay for information, in particular for medium probability levels of winning
-People would again pay for non-instrumental info
-Preference showed preference for ‘positively valenced’ information (eg winning)
-The tendency to pay for useless (non-instrumental) information correlates positively - and independently - with obsessive compulsive personality traits and anxiety

Question 19

Are humans willing to pay for information? Why?

Answer 19

• Humans are willing to pay for information
  
  • Neural correlates point towards overlapping network for reward and information
  • Some researchers even suggest a ‘common currency’ in the brain
  • The cognitive drivers might be diverse:
    ○ Anxiety reduction (via reduction of uncertainty) vs curiosity
    ○ Updating cognitive models (eg agentic choices are usually more informative)
    ○ Adaptive for survival via ‘hard wired’ preference for information (eg searching for a better food source)

Question 20

Explain the difference between anxiety and fear

Answer 20

• Anxiety and fear share many common physiological features, but they can be differentiated
  ○ Fear responses are elicited by specific stimuli and tend to be shortlived
  ○ Fear responses decrease when a threat has ben removed or dissipated
  ○ Anxiety may be experienced in the absence of any direct physical threat and typically persists over a longer period of time
  • Several prominent theories of Anxiety Disorder propose that dysregulation of the neurcircuitry of conditioned fear may be central to the disorder
  • Neuroimaging studies indicate that trait anxiety is associated with the heightened amygdala activation and elevated fear expression
  • Anxiety also impairs extinction learning and retention, as well as the regulation of emotional responses via cognitive strategies
  • These deficits appear to stem from impairments in the regulation by PFC of the amygdala
  • For example, anxious patient exhibit reduced prefrontal activation during or before fear extinction, and require heightened prefrontal recruitment to successfully reduce negative emotion with cognitive reappraisal

Question 21

Describe conditioned fear experiments

Answer 21

• Conditioned fear experiments have been used to understand the function of the cortical regions in fear processing
  ○ Where neutral stimulus (tone) acquires aversive properties by virtue of being paired with an aversive event (electric shock) and produces a conditioned fear response (CR), (eg anxiety, nausea)
  ○ After multiple pairings, presenting the tone alone will produce the conditioned fear response
  ○ Conditioned fear can be diminished via.a number of techniques
  § Extinction, presenting the tone repeatedly without the shock, resulting in a gradual decrease in the conditioned fear response
  § Extinction is the basis for graded desensitisation training in psychological practice

Question 22

What is systematic desensitisation?

Answer 22

• Developed in the 1950s by Dr Joseph Wolpe
  
  • An intervention that attempts to replace an anxiety or fear response with a relaxation response through a classical conditioning procedure
  • You gradually associate, through repeated pairing, a fear-arousing stimulus with a state of relaxation, in a series of graded steps

Question 23

Explain extinction of a conditioned fear

Answer 23

• Animal and human research with conditioned fear paradigms have demonstrated that fear can return AFTER successful extinction training
  ○ After the passage of time (spontaneous recovery)
  ○ Changes in context (renewal effect)
  ○ Stress (reinstatement effect)
  
  • The return of the conditioned fear response has been interpreted as evidence that the original ‘fear memory’ is not deleted, or erased, but rather inhibited during the extinction phase of conditioning experiments

Question 24

Explain neurocircuitry of fear conditioning

Answer 24

• A network or structures including the amygdala, hippocampus, ventromedial PFC, dorsolateral PFC and striatum
  
  • During cogntivie regulation, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) regulates fear expression through projections to the vmPFC, which in turn inhibits amygdala activity
  • Cognitive regulation strategies include
    ○ Reinterpret the significance of an event (cognitive reappraisal)
    ○ Focus attention on the less fearful aspects of a situation (selective attention)

Question 25

Explain neurocircuitry in active coping for fear

Answer 25

• Active coping
  ○ During active coping, information from the LA is routed not to the CE, which drives fear expression, but to the B, which in turn projects to the striatum. The striatum is thought to reinforce the instrumental action taken during escaape-from fearor avoidance learning
  ○ Active coping is argued to be the most commonly used ‘untaught’ methodwe use to regulate our emotions
  ○ Active coping strategies involve an awareness of the stressor, followed by attempts to reduce the negative outcome
  ○ We specifically engage in actions that result in positive emotional outcomes and as a result, avoid negative consequences of fear
  ○ Learn an action to avoid a fearful event or diminish the fear response
  ○ Examples: exercise, yoga,
  ○ Less ‘active’ but frequestly observed are behaviours such as rocking, vocalising tics

Question 26

Explain neurocircuitry in reconsolidation of fear

Answer 26

○ Reconsolidation diminishes conditioned fear expression through alteration of the original CS–US association stored in the LA.
○ Newer technique to regulate emotion, linked to the idea that immediately after learning there is a period of time where a memory is fragile, less permenant
§ This can be an issue for further exacerbation of the trauma of th ememory, rather than allowing to remain at the level it was when the person encountered it
§ Can also be an issue for bystanders recalling a crime - could be subject to warping ased on the cues they have been given in the interview
○ During the consolidation period, you actively seek to disrupt the formation of the
Memory
○ Or, if you are past the consolidation period, you look to modify or inhibit, but not
eliminate, the memory, by actively retrieving the memory
○ The act of retrieval makes the underlying memory trace fragile again, called the reconsolidation period
○ The reconsolidation period provides another opportunity to disrupt the memory, potentially allowing you to block the memory completely
○ Animal studies show that blockade of the reconsolidation period with protein synthesis inhibitors specifically blocks the reactivation of fear memories, but leaving other memories intact
○ Fear memories undergoing reconsolidation blockade using this method did not return with time, alteration od context cues or additional stress
○ Human research has been slow to emerge because of the need for a safe drug to block human reconsolidation
○ Propanalol was the first drug to be used for experimental reconsolidation blocker
§ Kindt et al. (2009), Schiller et al. (2010) and Debiec and LeDoux (2004) were
the first to show that in humans you could use propranolol to block the return of
Fear
§ Still not clear what the mechanism for propranolol’s effects are
§ Propanolol has now been trialled in RCTs for PTSD (Brunet et al. 2008),
Substance dependence (Lonergan et al. 2016)
§ Kohler et al. (2015) trialled a similar technique in major depression, arguing that
reducing the emotional load of autobiographical memories that are linked to
etiology and maintenance of the depression would be therapeutic
§ Most studies have failed to show clear beneficial effects in human studies

Question 27

What are the cognitive effects of anxiety?

Answer 27

• A large body of research highlights two key cognitive information processing biases that are characteristic of people with anxiety
  1) A bias to attend toward threat-level information
  § ^If people are over-sensitive to threat, you present them with the fixation cross followed by the two stimuli. Angry face is threat, neutral face is not. Then a star appears on the screen, and participants are asked to respond with their hand on the side that the star appears on. They are faster in responding to the side when the star appears on the side of the threatening face
  § Gets people to do this task repeatedly , and repeatedly pairing the location of the star with the non-threatening stimulus
  □ The reason for this, is with the goal of extinguishing the threat-related response
  2) A bias toward negative interpretation of ambiguous stimuli
  § For stimuli with more than one potential interpretation, people with anxiety have a tendency toward a more negative perception
  □ Ambiguous facial expressions
  □ Face-voice pairings
  □ Verbal homophones
  ® Eg people with anxiety are more likely to spell the word (dye/die) as die
  § When evaluating the probability of future life events, individuals with anxiety will judge the probability of negative outcomes as far more likely than non-anxious controls

Question 28

Explain the link between anxiety and economic decision making

Answer 28

• Attentional Bias and Negative evaluation studies suggest that the hyperactivity of the amygdala, while attending to, evaluating or anticipating negative stimuli, contributes to heightened cognitive and affective responses to potential threat stimuli
  
  • prefrontally mediated cognitive and affective regulation processes also appear to be impaired in anxiety, reducing the ability to modulate these pre-existing tendencies

Question 29

Explain the link between uncertainty, anxiety, and economic decision making

Answer 29

○ Across species, stimuli that are unpredictable elicit greater anxiety
○ When we are required to make a decision about a predictable stimuli, people with anxiety will show threat-related information processing biases that alter their decision-making
○ Because of the way they manage Risk:
§ When required to make a decision between uncertain choices, humans as a general trait will be risk averse
§ For all, amount of attention given to the aversive choice option predicts the likelihood of avoiding that option

-Dohmen et al., 2011 analysed the relationship between the response to a 10 point risk question, and other variables in 22 000 participants
-7% of respondents indicated a ‘0’, or ‘not at all willing to take risks’
-they had 4 variables to examine, given the nature of the survey: gender, height, age, and parental academic achievement
-Women were less likely to take risks than men
-Increasing age was associated with less risk tolerance
-Greater height was associated with greater risk tolerance
-Having a mother with higher academic achievement, and to a lesser extent, a father increased risk tolerance

		§ Measures of trait anxiety, worry, social anxiety and other measures of anxiety
		have consistently shown that in choice paradigms that correlate with greater
		risk avoidance/aversion
		§ Importantly, when the decision paradigm requires the anxious participant to
		make a choice for another person, they are less risk averse
	○ Evaluating your own physiological response to a risky choice appears to be critical to risk avoidance in anxiety
	○ If your evaluation of an option includes increase sympathetic nervous system responses (eg BP, HR, SCR increases), then anxious participants are more likely to avoid these options
		§ Alcohol masks a lot of these responses, so in casinos they will provide alcohol (sometimes for free), to disguise the physiological responses, and increase the risk-taking behaviour

Question 30

Explain the link between ambiguity, anxiety, and economic decision making

Answer 30

○ A decision where multiple possible outcomes with unknown probabilities must be chosen from
○ Like with the attentional bias effect, decisions between ambiguous options will illicit greater anxiety, and people with anxiety will show greater avoidance of ambiguous decision making
§ Eg choosing between a visible or opaque urn
□ Decisions between ambiguous options will elicit the greatest amount of anxiety. People who are anxious will try to avoid these situations, but if they have to, they will choose the option that provides them the least amount of info (?? Not sure about this tho)
□ Person with anxiety would rather leave it unknown, so would choose opaque
○ In ambiguous decision making situations, people with anxiety will overestimate the probability of negative outcomes, and their subjective cost
○ Car vs train example
§ Studies where people who have been in a train accident have been followed up. After they have recovered, there is a higher proportion of them who will choose to drive to work rather than take the train. But being in a car accident is much riskier - so they choose the riskier option by accident, because they overestimate the likelihood of a train accident because of their own experiences
§ Sense of control could also come into this, but there are lots of examples where control doesn’t come into it and the outcomes are generally still the same

Question 31

Describe the link between framing and loss aversion

Answer 31

• Framing
  ○ Anxiety, trait and clinical, is associated with greater framing effects in their decision making
  ○ Argued to be driven by loss aversion, where the increased sensitivity to the certain loss engenders an avoidant response, increasing risk taking behaviour
  
  • Loss aversion
    ○ The degree to which avoiding losses is prioritized in comparison to achieving equivalent gains
    ○ Anxiety, of all forms, is associated with increased loss aversion
  • Economic decision making vs personal decision making in the context of psychological interventions

Question 32

Describe how incidental emotions influence decision making

Answer 32

Incidental emotions carry over from one situation to the next, affecting decisions that should be unrelated
Incidental anger triggered in one situation automatically elicits a motive to blame individuals in other situations even though that targets of the anger have no relationship to the first trigger
Vignettes to elicit positive or negative moods influence risk perception
Johnson & Tversky (1983) found that inducing such moods influenced individual’s perception of fatality frequencies for potential causes of death
□ We’ve been speaking about fear, but there are also studies covering other emotions and how they impact appraisal - this table is just to demonstrate that point

Question 33

Emotions shape decisions via the depth of thought

Answer 33

– Many studies have shown that negative emotions increase the depth of information processing,
signaling when a situation demands additional attention
– Not always a good thing
– Increased focus on anchoring effects, where individual ruminate over the first piece of
information given to them in a decision making process
– Increasing cognitive load can moderate these effects
– Small and Lerner (2008) showed that relative to neutral state participants, angry participants
allocated less to welfare recipients, and sad participants allocated more – an effect that could be
eliminated when given greater unrelated cognitive demands

Question 34

How can Intervening reduce emotion effects

Answer 34

– Time delay
* The simplest strategy for minimizing the carryover effects of emotions on decision making it to ensure there is a
time delay
* Even 10-minute delays have been shown to mitigate the influence of anger on decision making (Gneezy and Imas,
2014)

– Supression
* Regulating or suppressing emotional responses has been tried as an internvention, but found to be ineffective
* Attempting to avoid feeling an emotion will reduce an individuals expression of the behavior, but not their
subjective experience of it

– Reappraisal
* Reframing and reappraising the meaning of stimuli that led to an emotional response has been found to tbe one of
the best strategies for dissipating the emotional response (Gross, 2002)

– Increasing awareness of misattribution
* LeDoux, 1996)

Question 35

Define a habit

Answer 35

• Reinforcement learning research in animals identified a definition for habit
  performance
  ○ the exhibition of a learned behavior that was insensitive to changes in rewarding
  outcomes
  
  • In humans (and animals) the common features of habit learning are
    ○ Repeated responding that forms context-response associations in memory
    ○ Automatic habit performance that is relatively insensitive to changes in the value
    of the response outcome
  • An important distinction to consider is that humans engage in much
    repetition of behaviour
    ○ E.g., high levels of repetition in daily activities
    ○ A difficulty is distinguishing a habit from other every day activities
    § If a behaviour results in no positive outcome would you continue to do it? Probably not. A lot of behaviours started off as goal-directed behaviours. Is there any immediate positive outcome to come from that behaviour (eg there is from charging a phone - so not a habit, whereas brushing teeth is a habit because the benefit is long-term and intangible)

Question 36

Describe the relationship between habits and goal-related behaviours

Answer 36

• Habits typically arise due to an interface with goal-related behavior
  ○ Goals direct human action by providing a definition of a desired outcome
  § Reflexes are different from reflexes - because habits can originate from goal-directed behaviour
  § Chewing nails for example, is a habit through negative reinforcement - it takes something away to make the experience better. Trciky example because the amount of it negatively reinforcing will differ between individuals. It negatively reinforces by distracting - hence the removal
  ○ Repetitious behavior is usually, but not necessarily, goal related and can be
  distinguished from habit behavior because it does not persist when the value of the
  repeated behavior is absent

Question 37

How do habits differ from automatic responses?

Answer 37

• All habits have a level of automaticity, but not all automatic responses are habits
  ○ E.g., Startle reflex is an automatic response, but it is not a habit
  
  • Habits differ from other automatic processes because they can be manipulated through:
    ○ Priming
    ○ Classical conditioning
    ○ Non-associative learning
  • Priming a particular goal, or attitude, can result in a range of responses
  • Implementation intentions (often referred to as automated goals) will only
    influence behavior insofar as they are consistent with someone’s motivation
    level or intention
    ○ Gets people to commit to continuing that behaviour to make it more likely to be repeated. Eg going to the dentist and they ask you at the end of your appointment when you are coming back
    ○ These don’t help with habits though
  • Habit automaticity is specific to a particular response or behavior
    ○ A range of cues can trigger habit behaviour
    ○ Cue related to an individuals physical environment
    ○ People and their behaviour
    ○ Preceding actions in a sequence
    § This is seen a lot in drug and alcohol behaviour. Once someone starts the first step of a sequence, it’s as though the individual does not have control and they will follow through to the end of the sequence. Each step cues/relates to the next step in the sequence
    § Eg Cigarette when at a bar or with alcohol. When people are trying to quit smoking, a common difficulty is when the individual is in an environment where they have historically smoked consistently (eg bar)

Question 38

Describe habit triggers

Answer 38

When habits are formed, perception of the relevant context cue
automatically activates the the mental representation of the
habitual response
Habits can be triggered/cued in deliberate or inadvertent ways
Eg being shown this picture of a library can trigger the response for people to feel the need to study
○ Advertising often taps into contextual components and emotional components to try and build associations which may lead to a habit involving their product

Question 39

Describe the relationship between habits and perception

Answer 39

• A habitual response is the cueing of mental representation that
  contains both the features of your response, but also the features
  of perceptual information that cues your response.
  ○ Neal et al. 2012
  ○ Uni students who went to the college’s sports stadium on a regular basis,
  when exposed to a picture of the stadium, would raise the volume of their
  voices during conversation with the experimenter
  § Example of locational cue that influences unconscious behaviour
  ○ Hogarth et al. 2012, QJEP
  ○ In animal literature, what they use is outcome-specific devaluation.
  ○ They tried to build up habitual behaviour and response in people, and see if they could get people to stop exhibiting that behaviour
  ○ Everytime participants gave a specific response, they would give them chocolate as a reward. They tried extinction methods and stopped giving the reward, and looked at how long it took participants to stop giving the desired response in the absence of reward
  ○ Something abuot human habitual behaviour, is that we tend to view rewards only as such until satiation (eg eating too much chocolate, so reward is devalued). That isn’t seen (or to a lesser extent) in animals)
  ○ Impulsive people were more driven by habitual cues
  § Suggests that people who are more impulsive are not necessarily as goal-driven, and are more reflexive to the information provided

Question 40

What is habit insensitivity?

Answer 40

• Habit performance is characterised by the insensitivity to the outcomes
  ○ Instrumental learning experiments, like Hogarth et al. 2012, demonstrate
  that participants who receive extensive training in choosing a reward (or
  pair a reward with a stimulus), will make habitual but unwanted choices
  in response to the cue even after being satiated

Question 41

What is a consequence of habit insensitivity?

Answer 41

• One consequence for this finding is that repeated behavior over
  time will become more habitual and less goal dependent
  ○ Social and Health psychologists have been able to use this understanding
  to conduct prediction studies around social and health behaviours
  ○ For example, in studying health behaviours, a persons stated behavioural
  intentions are a better predictor of future performance for occasional
  activities (e.g., cancer screening, vaccination), but not frequent activities
  (e.g., brushing teeth, drinking water, wearing a seatbelt, washing hands)

Question 42

How do habits interact with behavioural intentions?

Answer 42

• Habit strength will also interact with behavioural intentions
  ○ When habit strength is high for a certain behavior, behavioural intentions will be less
  predictive, but when habit strength is low, behavioural intentions will increase in predictive
  Power
  ○ Gardner et al.
  ○ Blood donation frequency over a longitudinal study indicated an interaction between habit
  strength and intentions
  ○ Participants with strong habits to donate blood did not show a relationship between
  intentions and actual donations, only those with weak habits showed a relationship wherein
  strong behavioural intentions predicted more frequent donation.

Question 43

Why do we have habits?

Answer 43

○ Dual Process models argue that habitual behavior exists because it offers a greater level of
Efficiency
○ Habits are a ready default setting for behavior that allow us to respond, unless we are particularly
motivated and able to engage in more deliberate and specific goal pursuit.

Question 44

Describe habit formation

Answer 44

• Habits develop through instrumental learning
  ○ Rewarded responses will be repeated – Thorndike
  ○ Everyday life is built upon repetition that provides multiple opportunities
  for habit formation
  ○ Experience Sampling studies asking participants about their thoughts and
  actions, once every hour, found that over 40% of responses were
  performed daily and in the same physical context (Khare and Inman,
  2006)
  ○ In many of these studies, participants reported that they did not
  consciously realise the repeated association between their behavior and
  the context

Question 45

How do habitual responding and motivation cues relate?

Answer 45

• Habitual responding continues to be influenced by motivational
  Processes
  ○ Pavlovian Context Cues are cues that become associated with the reward
  that follows the action
  ○ The cues can increase the likelihood of a habitual behavior being
  Expressed
  ○ The motivational effect of these cues is not related to the value of the
  Outcome
  § It was important to the uptake of the behaviour but not the continuation
  ○ Interval schedules are an example of a Pavlovian Context Cue and animal
  studies (Balleine and O’Doherty, 2010) demonstrate that habits develop
  most readily when rewards are provided on an interval schedule
  ○ An interval schedule means that responses are only rewarded after a
  period of time has elapsed, increasing (or decreasing) response rate during
  the interval does not change the amount of reward delivery
  ○ It is thought that this particular schedule has ecological validity, insofar as
  it mimics the way that natural resources are replenished over time (e.g.,
  rainfall)
  Eg checking phone - we keep checking phones to see if we have notification, but it does not mean we will have any notifications, yet we keep doing it
  ○ You can titrate the reward schedule in gambling to maximise the habit formed in want of the reward with the least frequent reward schedule

Question 46

What are interval schedules?

Answer 46

Interval schedules for reward are argued to positively influence habit
learning because we can form associations between context and response,
without having to have a representation of the goal or outcome of the
Action
Also avoids reward satiation
We can respond to a stimulus repeatedly, resulting in repetition and
automatization of our response, with occasional and unpredictable
rewards ensuring that the behavior doesn’t extinguish
We might continue to repeat a response, just in case this time is a longer
than usual interval
In gambling, this can look like ‘magical thinking’ - “if I press it with my left hand twice, and the right hand twice, that’s the secret code to the reward”
○ Patient-controlled pain relief results in patient using less pain relief. If they can ask someone else to be in control of it, they will keep asking and keep being given it because they are not responsible for the dose

Question 47

Does repetition always lead to habit formation?

Answer 47

○ If the repetition of a behavior includes decision making, it will generally prevent, or slow, the
formation of habitual behavior
○ Deliberative decision making protects against habit formation even when you respond
repeatedly to the exact same cue

Question 48

What has research shown in terms of extent of training and expression of habits?

Answer 48

• Human Research has typically not seen a relationship between the extent of
  training (or repetition) and greater expression of habits (it has for animals, but not humans)
  ○ De Wit et al. 2018 conducted 5 different experiments with three different reward devaluation
  paradigms, and found that the duration of stimulus-response training was not associated with
  habit expression

Question 49

Why is it important that studies have found a relationship between training extent and habit expression in animals (not for humans)?

Answer 49

○ The fact that this has been found in animals is important for 2 reasons
§ Animal studies have been used as a basis for clinical treatment in humans. Means we need to be more sceptical on how we can go about instilling or disrupting human habits
§ This also might mean that humans have capacity and abilities beyond what animals have (eg maybe more self-control and less impulsivity)
○ An implication for our understanding of habitual behavior in conditions such as Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder and Drug Dependence
○ Individuals may be more prone to developing habits after extensive training (see Linnebank
et al., 2018), but that conditions such as OCD may be an interaction between propensity for
habit learning combined with impairments in goal-directed control
○ Self-control abilities, such as impulse control and response inhibition aid people to control
their habitual responses
○ Sustained or temporary impairment to them can contribute to the greater tendency to express
habitual behaviour
§ Eg with alcohol and drug consumption, they have already had to have used reduced inhibition control to start drinking/taking drugs, and given that they impair your inhibition control further this becomes self-perpetuating
§ Also because of the tolerance

Question 50

Describe the habit neurocircuit

Answer 50

• Across animal and human research, converging evidence indicates that
  habitual behavior is mediated by circuits that link cortical brain areas and the
  basal ganglia
  ○ The basal ganglia is a subcortical structure, that houses a collection of subcortical nuclei
  This is a subcorticol to cortical relationship that is important in habit formation and maintenance
  ○ Associative cortico-basal ganglia loops support goal directed and habitual
  behavior
  § Prefrontal cortex links to caudate nucleus and anterior putamen for goal directed action
  § Sensorimotor loop that connects somatosensory, motor cortex with the medial and
  posterior putamen for habitual behaviours
  ○ Dorsolateral striatum appears critical to acquiring new habits
  ○ Dorsomedial striatum appears critical to goal-directed control

Question 51

What factors influence the balance between habits and goal pursuit?

Answer 51

• The balance between habits and goal pursuit can be influenced by a number of
  situational factors
  ○ Distraction
  ○ Time pressure
  ○ Task ability (or lack thereof)
  ○ Self-control
  
  • Habits will trump goal-directed behavior when they lack the
    ability and motivation to engage in deliberative decision making
    ○ Eg netflix removes the decision-making component as a whole, by introducing the automatic ‘next episode’ timer
  • Acute and Chronic stress, which have a bidirectional relationship
    with factors like distraction, time pressure, task ability and self
    control, will increase the reliance on habits

Question 52

What is the relationship between habits and awareness?

Answer 52

• People have some awareness of their habitual responses, but they have poor
  awareness of the cueing mechanism that activates the habit
  
  • One aspect of this lack of awareness is that participants with stronger habits
    will have a greater tendency to infer that behavior was guided by their
    behavioural intentions (or goals) – Neal et al. 2012
  • Over time, goals can be formed as a consequence of habitual behavior, rather
    than preceding it
  • For example, habits can become reinforced because of the ease with which
    they can be performed when compared to more deliberative, and potentially
    uncertain alternatives
    ○ Choosing the same seat in the lecture theatre, food for lunch, carriage for train ride, are all
    potentially habitual behaviours that are no longer tied to reward, but are reinforcing because
    of their ease and reduction of uncertainity

Question 53

What are common behaviour change techniques for habits?

Answer 53

• Behaviour change and public health initiatives are increasingly seen as critical
  to addressing some of our major illness categories
  
  • Meta-analyses (e.g., Webb & Sheeran, 2006) of successful behavior change
    interventions indicate that effective techniques, such as persuasive appeals, are
    effective tools for sporadic behaviours, but not behaviours that required habit
    formation
  • Behaviour change techniques have difficulty changing habitual behavior
    because the responses do not reflect a persons stated intention or desire
  • The major challenge is that habitual behavior continue to be activated
    automatically by recurring environmental cues
  • In response, behavior change techniques have focused on two aspect
    ○ 1) impede the automatic cueing of old, unwanted habits
    2) encourage the repeated use of new, desired behaviours to the point they become habitual

Question 54

Explain how to impede unwanted habit performance

Answer 54

Behaviour change techniques to reduce interference from old habits have
attempted to increase mechanisms of inhibition
Invoked thinking (Quinn et al. 2010)
Trying to insert thoughts about not performing a certain behavior, and then monitoring specifically
for failures
Inhibitory Plans (Adriaanse et al. 2010)
Attempting to link specific inhibitory plans to time or environmental cues
that are linked to the habitual behavior
E.g., After I get home from work I’ll take the dog for a walk, rather than snacking before dinner
^*invoked thinking and inhibitory plans are difficult to implement when the behaviour still needs to be done at time (eg changing diet can be difficult, because eating is still necessary so the cue can’t be removed)
Exposure Management or habit discontinuity (e.g., Thogersen, 2012)
Habit performance is prompted by environmental cues, so by reducing exposure to the
environment, or changing the environment, you can reduce the continuity of habit performance
that reinforces it
Life transitions (e.g., moving from school to University) can be a very powerful tool for habit
Change
§ Due (at least in part), to the removal of environmental cues

Question 55

How to encourage the formation of desired habits?

Answer 55

• Behaviour change techniques to encourage the formation of desired habits
  have not always been built upon the concepts of habit formation: repetition,
  stable context, appropriate reward schedules
  ○ Repetition required can be extensive
  § Lally et al. (2010) found that between 18 and 254 days of repeating a simple exercise behavior –
  Walking after dinner – was required for habit formation
  § Making a gym visit habitual appears to take 6 weeks, if you go 4 times a week (Kaushal and
  Rhodes, 2015)
  ○ Reminders can reduce automaticity
  § Interventions that provide external prompts for behaviours via electronic
  devices have had limited success
  □ Because if they are sent out at a constant time for everyone, it may not be at a time that it possible for the participant to engage in the desired behaviour, or they might not be sent out around the time of the maladaptive habit. Works better if location on the phone is enabled, and with geolocated bars (for example) to send tailored reminders ot the individual and environment
  § Reminders may disrupts automaticity, limit the stability of context and
  engage more deliberate decision making

Question 56

What should you consider before turning to neuroimaging?

Answer 56

-Neuroimaging is expensive, complicated, correlational

-prior to doing a brain imaging experiment, ask yourself if you have questions about the brain, behaviour, both, or something else

• ○ ^ the brain is so complicated, we can’t actually say X area controls the reward system - we only know that they might be related, not definitively that the brain area causes a certain response
  ○ Think carefully about the question - if it is about behaviour, then you probably won’t need brain studies. They might be interesting, but it may not be worth all of the money and resources

Question 57

What is neuroeconomics?

Answer 57

• “By combining both theoretical and empirical tools from neuroscience, psychology, and economics into a single approach, the resulting synthesis will provide insights valuable to all three disciplines” Prof Paul Glimcher
  
  • Neuroscience = the neural underpinnings of behaviour and mind
  • Psychology = science of behaviour and mind
  • Economics = science of choice

Question 58

Describe economics to predict behaviour

Answer 58

• Economics as a discipline is most focused on understanding the exchange of goods, services, information etc
  
  • Classic = supply & demand
    ○ Supply goes up, demand goes down and vice versa
    ○ You can decrease the amount of items there are in the market which would artifically increase the deman (eg limited edition)
  • What determines the ‘price’ the consumer is willing to ‘pay’
    ○ Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it

Question 59

How do we best predict choice?

Answer 59

• Learning from observation
  ○ What people have done tells us what they might do
  ○ We could ask people why the chose something, but that requires them to have insight into why they did it - often this isn’t the case

Question 60

What is objective value?

Answer 60

○ Things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them (ie subjective value)
- ○ Eg diamonds - There was a campaign from the diamond industry telling everyone that diamond is what people should have when they get married - they had celebrity endorsement, and they equated the amount of their partner’s love with the size of the diamond
○ What if the diamond suppliers volts were open - and everyone had greater access to them, but there was a severe drought - how much would it take for you to give diamonds away for water?
○ Availability and need are a huge part of value

Question 61

How can we improve our predictions?

Answer 61

• Know the market
  ○ Is water readily available?
  ○ Supply and demand
  
  • Know the buyer/seller history
    ○ Has the buyer been willing to pay more than market cost?
    ○ Eg brand loyalty
  • Know the traits of buyer/seller
    ○ Is the seller risk averse?
    ○ Individual/group tendencies
  • Know the states of the buyer/seller
    ○ Is the buyer really thirsty?
    ○ Supply and dmeand
  • Traditional economics only permits us to observe
  • Behavioural economics permits us to ask
  • Neuroeconomics permits us to look at the brain regions that we think compute the value

Question 62

Explain Kahneman & Tversky’s prospect theory

Answer 62

§ Saying that the choices people make are not rational
§ People don’t do what they ‘ought’ to do if we’re just taking into consideration the rational calculation of what should do - we are very loss averse
§ So the relationship between the objective value (or rational value), and the subjective value. This curve displays that the nature of the relationship between what something is actually worth, and what people think it’s worth. The bigger the loss, the stronger the feeling for someone to not be interested in that even if that loss process is something they rationally should engage in. That curve looks different for gains - in smaller amounts, the slope is different; in smaller amount the ratio of what people think something is worth changes really fast, with larger amounts there is a less subjective difference between the amounts (eg people will not consider them to be much of a difference between 10k and 11k, but a large difference between $5 and $10). So people consider gains and losses differently
§ We can multiple the amount that people weight the probabilities. People don’t view 50% as actually 50%. People tend to overestimate bad things (or low prob events) happening, and underestimate good things (or high prob events) happening.
§ If someone offers you $5 and you already have $5 in your pocket, the money won’t mean as much as if someone offers you a $5 sandwich. So the value of something is not actually how someone values something

• ○ The same amount of money could feel different if it’s a potential loss or potential gain

Question 63

Explain the certainty effect in prospect theory

Answer 63

○ ^You are given two options
§ Option A is 95% chance you will get $10 000, and a 5% chance you will get nothing
§ Option B is 100% chance you will get $9, 499
§ Most people would choose B, even though A is a better option by $1
§ This is the certainty effect - people would rather make the choice where there is a certainty of getting something out of it

Question 64

Explain Possibility effect in prospect theory

Answer 64

• Option A is 5% chance you will get $10 000, and a 95% chance you will get nothing (objective value is .05*10,000 = $500)
  Option B is 100% chance you will get $501
• § Option B is the better gamble
  § Most people would go for A though
  § This is the possibility effect - the idea of getting a lot of money would make people more likely to choose that opportunity than the objectively more rational option
  § Also depends on what the amounts mean to the individual

Question 65

Explain probability weighting according to Kahneman & Tversky

Answer 65

○ Diagonal line is real probability, if we’re following regular economics, everyone should behave according to the diagonal line - perfectly rational (actual probability aligns perfectly with the actual probability)
○ Curved line is people’s actual behaviour
○
○ When it comes to low probability events, people overestimate their occurrences (eg plane crash)
○ High probability events (eg getting in a car accident), are underestimated
* Values are not values, and probabilities are not actual probabilities either
○ People are not rational, people do not think about statistics in a traditional way when they are making decisions
§ They modify and modulate how they think about probabilities and statistics depending on how they think
§ If we can gauge what someone is like (eg more risk/loss averse, or more risky, then we can predict what they might choose a bit easier)
* A rational prediction of behaviour is still better than a random guess, even if it might not exactly map onto their behaviour though
* People with PTSD will look at probabilities very differently because of their past events
○ They will have a different mental model
○ Even if they know the actual probabilities, they have a very strong mental model, so their estimation of what will happen will be considerably differently

Question 66

How do we model attitudes?

Answer 66

• We cannot rely on a single choice to provide us with an estimate of risk or loss attitudes. We must collect large samples of behaviour to get accurate estimates of an individual’s behavioural preferences
  
  • We can then model their attitudes using a variety of approaches:
    ○ Model fitting (traditional vs bayesian)
    § In traditional, you get the mean of the group (a single value/line that can be fit to the data)
    § A Bayesian model operates on the idea that for each data point, there is a distribution/probability of data. So each data point represents a normal distribution, and then the line represents that mean of the distributions. So even you get a single average for an individual, it recognises a likely range for each individual
    □ This is closer to reality - no one represents only one value
    □ There is a theory about the fact that traits are characteristic/reflective of an accumulation of different states - so how anxious someone is for example, is represented by a range
    □ This is at the individual level (you can do group level, called hierarchical bayesian analysis, but we are talking at an individual level rn)

Question 67

If we can model preferences, why bother with brain imaging?

Answer 67

• There are objections to using neuro- methods to predict choice
  
  • Preference estimates are far from perfect and are computed from past behaviours
  • The brain is ultimately making the choice, and therefore, should be a more direct predicter of choice
  • In other words, if we can get closer to where exactly the choice is being made, we might improve our predictions

Question 68

How helpful is neurogimaging?

Answer 68

○ Different trade-off with neuro-imagining
§ We can use very fast techniques, or we can get a specific insight into brain regions
§ Can’t do both at once

Question 69

**Explain how neuroeconomics is integrative

Answer 69

• Remember we are integrating across three different disciplines:
  ○ Economics
  § Theories, the idea for value, and preferences
  ○ Neuroscience
  § What does the brain do with signals of reward, how does the brain allow people to select a certain choice (eg activation)
  ○ Psychology
  § How do people actually behave to enact the choices, and what interpersonal factors could influence individual feelings about these choices (eg experiments)
  
  • The combination of approaches allows us to build holistic models of decision-making

Question 70

**What are better models of decision-making (than prospect theory, for example)?

Answer 70

-Rangel, Camerer, & Montague
- ○ First thing, is that there is a representation (or mental model) - giving your understanding of what you should do/allows you to think about your options
○ Next is valuations - in terms of the options, how do you value them? What is the value of each option, and how much do you value the outcomes of each option (so internal and external pressures)
○ Valuation influences action selection - now you have thought about your options and your valuations of the options, you actually select the option you want to enact
○ Then it’s outcome evaluation - how did that action work for you?
○ This outcome evaluation influences your learning - take the match or mismatch of our expectations and the consequences/rewards, and use that to influence your future behaviours
§ Updating only occurs if you get feedback on an action
§ In some decisions, the consequences are not immediate - if you give a person feedback for each trial in an experiment, for example, then you need to account for learning. If you want to gauge attitudes, then you shouldn’t give immediate feedback because it doesn’t allow for learning until after the experiment is done
§ You may not learn as quickly if consequence is miniscule but immediate, or if it is delayed
§ Absence of feedback can also be a kind of feedback - eg speeding: if you don’t get caught it could encourage you to do it again

Question 71

Where does each stage of Rangel, Camerer, & Montague’s decision-making model occur in the brain?

Answer 71

○ Each of these stages happens in different areas of the brain (roughly
§ Representation occurs in the Prefrontal cortex
§ Valuation is happening in more frontal and medial areas (eg orbito-frontal cortex and medial-frontal cortex)
§ Action-selection is in the anterior cingulate cortex (further to the back of the brain)
§ Outcome evaluation (lower portions of the brain eg nucleus accumbens - NAcc)
§ Learning happens all over the brain, because the learning process will impact all of those stages - if you are learning correctly it should be changing the functioning of all of those sections
□ You can learn at any level - it’s not saying you necessarily learn at all steps and all at once, it’s more that learning is happening at a given step and people change their model
○ These are all correlational, but strongly correlational

Question 72

Explain the study looking at outcome evaluation in Rangel, Camerer, & Montague’s decision-making model

Answer 72

○ Classic pavlovian stimulus experiment
§ Gave them some reward, and the dots indicate neuronal firing (the bars above indicate where there was most neuronal firing) - line indicates when line was given
□ When given a reward, there is highest neuronal firing
§ Then the cue the reward with clicking of fingers
□ The highest neuronal firing then occurs with the clicking rather than the reward
□ When no reward gets given, the neuronal firing occurs with the clicking, but then this brain area goes silent when the reward was expected (the blank signal in the third image)
® This indicates the brain accounting for the prediction error - and learning that the clicking no longer necessarily triggers a reward

Question 73

Explain the study on rats exploring mental representation and learning

Answer 73

• Put rats in mazes - rat has to find its way through the maze to get to the cheese
  
  • You do this experiment repeatedly, it should get faster and remember the route to get the cheese
    ○ Is the rat trialling different options, is this by trial and error, or is the rat developing a mental model of the maze
    ○ So the experimenter blocked part of the maze. If by trial and error the rat learned to go through the maze a certain way and that way is blocked, then it should have to restart the learning process and re-trial and error so should be slow
    ○ If it is learning through a mental representation, then it shouldn’t be sow because it should be able to think of an alternate route in its mental model to get to the cheese

Question 74

Explain Representation: model-based vs model-free

Answer 74

• Despite recognition that animals use models (Tolman), relative lack of effort to integrate this idea
  
  • Assumption was that learning was predominantly trial-and-error (model-free)
  • Daw developed a means of examining activity concurrent with both types of learning
  • Experiment to test the different stages of trial-and-error learning vs mental model learning
  • You have to learn particular symbols to get to a specific cue (which will lead to a reward). Picking green left option is most likely to get you to the highest reward symbol (for example)
  • Found that model-based learning was occurring, but that both learning co-occurs in overlapping but slightly different parts of the brain
  • Once we know something about the decision space, we can draw from the mental model (mode-base), but to get there we have to use trial-and-error learning (model free)
    ○ So this is why both can co-occur

Question 75

Where does valuation occur in the brain?

Answer 75

Valuation process happens in ventro-medial pre-frontal cortex

Question 76

Describe action selection

Answer 76

In action selection, there is a process whereby it can boost decision making (can make an action easier or faster) - eg it can prime or prepare brain areas associated with movement if the behaviour relates to movement
* So this process primes certain brain regions related to the action to be fired

Question 77

What makes neuroeconomics unique?

Answer 77

• There is some arguments about whether neuroeconomics is actually unique
  ○ Mathematical psychology
  ○ Computational/cognitive science
  ○ Computational cognitive neuroscience
  ○ Computational psychiatry
  
  • Main(/only) difference is that neuroeconomics fundamentally relies on economic models of choice
  • Things that would seem to clearly to be neuroeconomics are implementation of economic models to behaviour while collecting brain data

Question 78

What is temporal discounting

Answer 78

• You can have $5 today, or $10 a week from today, and we can fit a discounting curve to estimate at how do you value something with time lapsing
  
  • People with low impulsivity and high impulsivity have very different presentations of this curve

Question 79

What are NP hard problems?

Answer 79

• Certain types of decisions that people make, where traditional decision models and probability estimates just don’t work
  
  • Example is if you have a knapsack and you have to fill it with stuff that is worth a different amount of money. You have to try and put the most value in the bag, but the bag can only carry so much weight. It is combinational calculation that has to be done to decide what to put in the bag - so can’t use traditional decisional models

Question 80

What were some drivers of panic buying during the pandemic?

Answer 80

○ Perception of scarcity
○ Fear of the unknown
○ Coping behaviour
§ Gaining a sense of control
○ Psychosocial behaviour
§ Social influence and norms

Question 81

What messages were trialled in the study exploring how to reduce panic buying?

Answer 81

○ Control = no message
○ A norms + reciprocity message
○ Scarcity message
○ Message appealing to morals

Question 82

Describe the study seeking to reduce panic buying

Answer 82

• Took those messages to an online trial to see which would be most effective at reducing panic buying
  ○ Ask intentions (which lacks external validity, intention-action gap):
  The measures we collected included whether respondents:
  ● felt a greater desire to go to the supermarket,
  ● intended to purchase more of specified items that were commonly panic bought
  (such as toilet paper, meat, and flour)
  ● perceived that the products would run out, and
  ● trusted others to shop responsibly for these products
  ○ Set it up as a prisoner’s dilemma
  § Individual benefit to panic buy, but in the interests of the community as a whole to not panic buy
  
  • Panic buying as a cooperation game
    ○ Intentions can be a useful indicator, but the do not always lead to changes in behaviour. To address this they included the prisoner’s dilemma
    ○ Panic buying can be thought of as a similar problem to the prisoner’s dilemma - if everyone cooperates then there will be no shortages, which will lead to the best outcome for society overall. But the optimal strategy for each individual is to panic buy - esp if they believe that others will also panic buy
    ○ Would give them a scenario where they were told they would be locked down for 2 weeks, how much of X (eg pasta) would they need. This provided a baseline
    ○ They would then be given the hypothetical option to either choose to purchase only as much, or less than what they need, or more than this amount
    ○ They were told that they could earn an additional payment depending on their choice and the choices of others. These additional payments were structured to reflect the payoffs of a prisoner’s dilemma

Question 83

What were the findings of the messaging to reduce panic buying?

Answer 83

○ Appeal to norms message had the largest impact on purchasing intentions
○ The scarcity message also saw a smaller reduction in intentions to increase purchasing, but this difference was not significant as conventional levels
○ The norms and reciprocity message had almost no effect
○ But, both appeals to morals and norms + reciprocity significantly reduce panic buying behaviours but an extremely large effect size
§ Scarcity message didn’t significantly reduce panic buying behaviours (but still reduced them a bit)

Question 84

Explain how the scarcity message reduced expectations of
products running out in the panic buying study

Answer 84

The scarcity message - which highlighted that
Australia had no shortage of supplies - appeared
to be the best at reducing expectations that
products might run out. This may partly explain
why the scarcity message also saw a reduction in
the intentions to increase purchasing.

Question 85

What did the panic buying study find about trust in others to do the right thing?

Answer 85

Across all treatments, around two thirds of all
respondents trusted respondents to shop
responsibly either slightly or not at all.
We also asked for trust in others to shop
responsibly for specific products. Interestingly,
trust in others was particularly low for toilet paper -
respondents’ average rating was approximately
1.7 (i.e., between “not at all” and “slightly”).

Question 86

Explain how appeals to morals and norms & reciprocity
significantly reduced panic buying behaviours in the panic buying study

Answer 86

Both the appeal to morals and the norms and
reciprocity treatments saw a large and significant
reduction in simulated panic buying in our
behavioural task, compared to the control (no
message about panic buying). This translated to a
decrease of 8.6 and 8 percentage points
respectively (relative decreases of 42% and 39%)
in the likelihood that respondents chose to
purchase more than they needed. The scarcity arm
saw a reduction as well, but this was not
statistically significant.

Question 87

Explain what the panic buying study revealed about how common panic buying was

Answer 87

Only a minority reported previous panic buying
behaviour:
Panic buying is generally only an issue in a minority of
the population, even though it may seem more
prevalent (e.g., due to media reports), and the impacts
can affect many people (a small number of people
over-purchasing can quickly lead to empty shelves). As
such, there may be a role for the government to inform
the public about the fact that the majority of people do
the right thing.

Even though it is self-reported data, it is consistent with
wider research about panic buying more globally. For
example, research from the UK found that around 70%
of people reported no or very slight increases in
purchasing during the initial stages of the pandemic.

Question 88

What did the panic buying study reveal about public support for supermarket purchase limits?

Answer 88

There was overwhelming support for supermarkets
introducing their own purchase limits.
Notably, when looking at a breakdown of responses,
around 80% either supported or strongly supported the
measures, with just 6% opposing or strongly opposing.
Support for these measures was consistent across
demographics, though notably older cohorts were the
most supportive overall, with 90% of those aged over 65
supporting or strongly supporting purchase limits

Question 89

What recommendations came out of the panic buying study?

Answer 89

-Use a moral or norms-based appeal to
combat panic buying

-Continue to encourage supermarket
purchase limits

-Consider further testing to refine
messaging

Question 90

Describe product preferences according to front-of-pack promotions

Answer 90

○ Looking at packaged foods and they varied the advertising techniques on these packages
§ Control just showed the food
§ Nutrient content claim condition (depicted one health-related claim on the package)
§ Sports celebrity (showed the face of a celbrity with their endorsement on the packages)
§ Premium offer condition (Showed an offer eg a free DVD advertised on the package)
○ Found that kids were most likely to choose unhealthy products when they depicted the nutrition content claim more than the condition (and more than the other conditions)
○ Boys were also more influenced by the celebrity endorsement (could reflect either that boys are more influenced by this, but also could be because the industry tends to depict male sports celebrities)

Question 91

What is the Australian context with gambling?

Answer 91

• Australia has the highest per capita gambling loss compared to comparable cultre countries (almost twice as more)
  ○ This is especially for Electronic gambling machines (EGM)
  
  • Individuals who become addicted contribute a vast proportion of revenue for gambling
  • EGMs were associated with social harms at a rate that supercedes other gambling behaviours
    ○ More people at clinics identify EGMs as their primary gambling method)
    ○ Also more associated with suicide risk
  • In WA, where EGMs are only available at casinos, the risk is about half the level of other states - something to say about the access to EGMs

Question 92

Describe the design of EGMs

Answer 92

• Rapid and continuous mode of gambling - could place a bet every 2 or 3 seconds
  ○ Much more rapid than other forms of gambling (eg horse race)
  ○ Argument that increasing the time between bets could reduce the intensity and addictivity
  
  • Framing loses as wins
  • Modern day slot machines allow for people to place bets of aligning symbols across a max of 25 lines on the screen
    ○ So if you place 1 cent on each line, and bet a total of 25 cents, if you win one of these lines and win 15 cents, that is framed as a win
    § In reality, they bet 25 cents and only got 15 back, so are actually at a loss
    § This loss will never be displayed, and instead, the “win” will be followed by loud noises and flashing lights - a loss disguised as a win
    ○ People tend to overestimate the amount they have won on EGMs that have losses disguised as wins

Question 93

What were the findings of the study looking at Electronic Gambling Machines, and losses disguised as wins (LDW)

Answer 93

○ Participants were shown a video of an EGM screen that had no wins, wins, and LDWs
○ Asked ‘on how many spins did the player win more than they bet?’
○ In the losses disguised as wins conditions, the participants were less accurate in their answers - less were correct in their assertion, and more overestimated the amount of wins in accordance with the amounf of losses disguised as wins

Question 94

What are the differing theories explaining people with gambling problems and LDWs

Answer 94

○ Two diff theories
§ If someone gambles frequently, they might be desensitised to thisfeature, so they might be less affected by it
§ Alternatively, it could be more emphasised, because this is what got them addicted in the first place
○ Findings showed that there was no difference across gamblers and no gamblers - both groups were equally susceptible to the losses disguised as wins, which makes it a very good regulatory focus because it is a risk and harm for everyone

Question 95

• Could losses disguised as wins (LDWs) contribute to addictive or harmful gambling?

Answer 95

○ Skinner
§ Slot machines, roulette wheels, dice cages, horse races and so on pay off on a schedule of variable reinforcement
§ The efficacy of such schedules in generating high rates of responding has long been known to be proprietors of gambling establishments
○ *Variable reinforcement is the most robust at predicting behaviour because the reward cannot be predicted
○ Example:
§ If you have a series of losses in between the wins, then there is more likely for extinction to develop, because of loss aversion - people are more likely to get up an leave
§ But what happens if you replace some of the losses with LDWs?
□ More frequent pos reinforcement, and also they have disrupted the string of losses and their aversive effects
® So dialling up pos reinforcement while dialling down extinction
□ Classical conditioning - leads to automatic rather than deliberate behaviours
□ The sounds of LDWs are the same as actual wins
® The conditioned association could contribute to how closely LDWs are perceived to be actual wins
® We can use conditioned stimuli itself (Eg the music) as positive reinforcers which can perpetuate a very long sequence of behaviour of continuing gambling
□ This is contingent on the fact that LDWs are perceived to be as rewarding as actual wins

Question 96

Describe the study exploring LDWs perceived to be as rewardign as actual wins

Answer 96

◊ Conducted brain studies (through EEGs) to look at how the brain processes the wins of LDWs compared to actual wins and losses
◊ Looked at the difference between amplitudes recorded through the EEG between the losses, wins, and LDWs
◊ Were playing either blue game or green game
} Outcomes of both games were the same - but purpose of this is to make the participants feel as though they have control over their outcomes depending on their choice, which is critical for reward processing (people need to feel as though they had some control over the outcome to feel the reward of the outcome most)
} In this study, it was looking at the visual component alone, not the sound (this was to simplify the activity they looked at)
◊ Presented two LDWs, two small wins, one large win, and one loss
◊ Found that LDWs are eliciting more of a positivity reward compared to losses, which is very similar to small wins
◊ So despite LDWs being lost, they are processed with comparable rewards of positivity with small wins

Question 97

How do LDWs relate to national Electronic gAMBLING machine regulations?

Answer 97

• Regulations (National standard)
  ○ Provision that EGMs cannot be misleading, illusory, or deceptive
  § Consistent with Australian consumer law which also states that people cannot be mislead
  ○ Since LDWs seem to consistently lead people to believe something that isn’t true, it seems that EGMs are not in accordance to Australian regulations

Question 98

What did community members think about pokie machines being misleading?

Answer 98

• Does this pass the pub test (asking community members):
  ○ ‘to what extent do you agree/disagree with the statement that pokie machines are likely to mislead or deceive consumers?
  § Control condition had this question asked as was
  § Intervention condition had participants read an article about what LDWs are
  ○ Regardless of condition, approx. 80% of participants agreed or strongly agreed
  ○ Intervention condition strongly agreed with the statement at a statistically significant rate higher than the control condition

Question 99

What is computational psychiatry?

Answer 99

• Aims to provide an explanatory bridge between altered cognitive function and neurobiological mechanism associated with mental illness
  
  • Uses computational modelling to formalise the mathematical relationship between symptoms, environment, and neurobiology
  • Provides tools to aid diagnosis and identify the neurobiological causes of specific symptoms in individual patients

Question 100

What tools are used in computational psychiatry?

Answer 100

• Tools to use
  ○ Magnetic Encephalography (MEG) - works similarly to EEG, but instead of recording electrical activity, records magnetic activity generated by the brain
  § Can find out when things are happening with very good time resolution
  ○ EEG
  § Can find out when things are happening with very good time resolution
  ○ fMRI
  § Can find where things are happening in the brain with very good spatial resolution
  ○ Diffusion imaging
  § Looks at brain connectivity across different regions
  
  • People used to identify which areas of the brain were activated for certain tasks (Eg facial recognition), and would name them accordingly
    ○ But within the last 15 years or so, we realised that the brain is very interconnected, so there is not one area alone that it responsible for one specific activity

Question 101

How does the brain respond to listening to a familiar song?

Answer 101

• When you hear the first few notes of a song you like, your brain starts to predict the next few notes of the song
  ○ But if there is a different arrangement that is played from the recorded song you are familiar with, the brain tries to predict what will happen next
  ○ If we were able to measure what happened in people’s brains when a different version of their favourite song is played
  § Brain updates its model of reality, because the expectations were not true to the events (prediction error response/mismatched negativity)
  □ Mismatched negativity is more specific to EEG and to a time window between 100 and 250ms (refers to the peak), whereas prediction error response is an umbrella term that isn’t specific to a time frame

Question 102

Explain the oddball paradigm in experiments exploring how the brain responds to music

Answer 102

○ Music experiments in the lab are very hard to control, so instead they do the oddball paradigm
§ People are played a string of repetitive sounds - most of the time the sound is predicatble, but once in a while there is a sound that deviates from their expectations
Zoomed in on one EEG electrode to identify the responses to the standard and deviant noise, as well as the difference between the responses
○ Shows that the brain is making predictions, and noticing deviant stimulus

Why should we care?
* Index of sensory memory trace
* Index of learning patterns or regularities
* Index of detecting violations or irregularities

Question 103

What is the relevance of prediction errors for psychiatry?

Answer 103

• These prediction error responses are reduced in schizophrenia - implications for diagnosis
  
  • (Also relevant for computational neurology as this response is also reduced in coma and predictive awakening
    ○ People in a coma who have a predicition error response/mismatched negativity are more likely to wake up
    ○ Controls have the largest peak, and people who are chronic patients have the lowest prediction error
    § There is a trend where from healthy controls to chronic, the mismatched negativity becomes smaller and smaller across the different stages
    § So we can see how this could be useful for identifying the stage someone is at in their diagnosis and their potential trajectory

Question 104

How did mismatched negativity differ between people who had developed schizophrenia vs those who didn’t?

Answer 104

○ This has been replicated globally (some argue that it is the most robust biomarker of schizophrenia)
○ (First image is mapped where up is neg)
○ Looked at people who were at ultra high risk of developing schizophrenia, it was quite a homogenous group
§ Followed up with these people after 12-18 months, and saw that some people had transitioned into schizophrenia, and some didn’t
§ So the researchers looked back to the EEG to look at their past mismatched negativity
§ The people who transitioned into schizophrenia already had a smaller mismatched negativity, even though there had been no difference in their behaviour

Question 105

How have studies started exploring individual level predictors to identify whether an individual is likely to develop schizophrenia?

Answer 105

□ To do this, they have started using AI, and found that they could predict from the EEG data, the overall function of the individual - a direct comparison between brain signals and funcitoning, this can be seen in this following study:
○ Red shows a condition where they played sounds, some shorter and some longer to measure the mismatched negativity
○ In yellow, rather than playing longer sounds as the deviant sounds, the included a silent gap (so a pause between sounds), which also lead to a prediction error gap
○ In green, there is another version of the silent gap
○ Blue was interaural difference between sounds played to which ear (so sometimes the sound would play on the left and sometimes on the right)
○ Across different sets of oddball paradigms, we can make predictions about whether individuals will belong to a group developing schizophrenia, or not with 80% accuracy
§ This technique should never replace the clinician - it should be used in conjuction

* Need to identify whether these reductions are specific to schizophrenia, or whether they are also demonstrated by schizoaffective disorder for example
* So looked at the responses for clinical patients with schizophrenic patients, nonpsychotic inpatients, and controls
	○ Saw that the schizophrenia patients had smaller mismatched negativity
	○ For the nonpsychotic clinical group, the mismatched negativity is not significantly different from the healthy groups
	○ But there is a significant difference between the clinical schizophrenia patients and the clinical non schizophrenia patients

Question 106

What were the findings from a connectivity model studies looking at delusions, hallucinations, and psychotic-like experiences?

Answer 106

○ These are results from the connectivity model, looking at how different areas relate to each other
○ The arrows correspond to the connections in the brain which change in the connectivity with respect to various symptoms
○ Hallucinations are associated with decreased bottom-up connectivity
§ Bottom-up because it is going from lower processing to higher?
○ Delusions associated with decreased bottom-up connectivity
○ Psychotic-like experiences (can be seen in the general population - unusual experiences)
§ People who have more psychotic-like experiences also have reduced top-down connectivity

Question 107

What is the relationship between white matter and psychotic-like experiences?

Answer 107

People who have higher psychotic-like experiences have reduced white matter

	○ Looking at more specific white matter pathways in the brain for the auditory system Pathways that linked the left and right, there was a reduction of white matter connectivity as the psychotic-like experiences increases

Question 108

What did the study mapping psychotic symptoms onto the brain find?

Answer 108

○ This in an approach where we can make predictions about symptoms specifically
§ Because two people with the same diagnoses can have completely different presentations of symptoms
○ Looked at data (from people being scanned while they were being played oddball sounds) who had to detect sounds that were novel
§ Looked at which parts of the brain light up when we hear deviant sounds
§ There is a network
§ So this above image shows the networks that are activated with deviant sounds
§ So there are auditory areas, motor control areas, subcortical areas like the amygdala (and I missed the last one)
□ Some symptoms can be predicted in this model, but others can’t
® Attention and hallucinations have highest alignment of the predictions and the symptoms
□ Wanted to know what brain areas are most associated with this prediction
® For hallucinations, the temporal parietal junction is activated in a way that is correlated with the severity of the symptoms
® Could this be used to treat hallucinations - by stimulating this area of the brain? (we don’t know the answer, but it is good to consider)

Question 109

What is the psychosis continuum?

Answer 109

Psychotic experiences relate to disrupted sensory prediction errors and brain dysconnectivity
Machine learning and neuroimaging may inform diagnosis and help map specific symptoms onto brain structures
* Psychosis symptom continuum theory says that psychosis exists on a continuum where everyone has varying levels of symptom presentation, but the diagnosis occurs at a given threshold (where the severity of symptoms impacts on someone’s everyday functioning)

Question 110

How is psychosis taken into consideration in the law?

Answer 110

• Psychotic symptoms may be part of an intoxication syndrome, and resolve rapidly
  with the excretion of the psychotogenic (that is, psychosis-causing) substance from
  the body.
  
  • Relatively short-lived psychotic symptomatology may be judged to be due to the
    direct physiological effects of an ingested substance, and the symptoms may persist
    for a short period (days or weeks) after excretion of the substance.
    ○ This is most common (in Aus) with methamphetamine use
  • The term substance induced psychosis is used in the diagnostic classification
    schemes employed in mental health (American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2000;
    World Health Organisation (WHO), 2004) to describe such transient disorders.
  • A person’s use of a psychoactive substance, either once or, more commonly,
    repeatedly, may be associated with the emergence of a psychotic illness, which then
    continues to have an independent long-term existence even in the absence of ongoing
    substance use.
    ○ Someone using psycho-active drug can coincide with someone who has psychotic illnesses
  • A person with an established psychotic illness may engage in substance abuse, which
    appears to precipitate psychotic relapses.
  • **Basically, we are talking about three categories of people:
    ○ Someone without mental illness but exacerbates the use of meth which induces a psychotic break, but it will resolve after treatment and abstaining;
    ○ the second group continue to use methamphetamine intermittently, but also have a psychotic illness, so the symptoms do not stop after abstaining from the drug;
    ○ the third category is people who were not using the drug, who were diagnosed with a psychotic illness, and then start using the drug which can precipitate the psychotic break

Question 111

Does meth induce violent behaviour?

Answer 111

○ Animal literature suggest that it doesn’t really:
§ Acute doses in animals have inconsistently produced violent behaviour, low to
moderate doses appear to augment aggressive responses, but the effects are not
consistent across species or paradigms
§ Some of the mixed results are possibly confounded by the acute effects of meth on
increased vigilance and psychomotor behaviour
§ Acute doses of dextro-amphetamine, which is an oral medication used to treat
narcolepsy and other conditions, show no increases in aggression
□ Increased talking, motor activity, anorexia, ‘friendliness’ but no acute or chronic
increases in aggression
* Chronic use has been prescribed to successfully treat aggressive behaviour in
children with ADHD
* Consistently associated in animal experiments and human observational studies with
increased aggression during opioid withdrawal
* Chronic methamphetamine exposure in animal studies (Sokolov and colleagues) has
consistently demonstrated increased aggression and fighting behaviour
* 60+% of heavy chronic Meth users report problems with aggression and problems
controlling violent behaviour
* Australian data indicates that prevalence of violent crime amongst regular Meth
users is comparable to other illicit drug using groups (McKetin et al, 2005)

Question 112

What is the relationship between intoxication and violence?

Answer 112

• NSW Sentencing Council 2009 – Sentencing for
  Alcohol-related violence
  ○ Almost half of assault offences and three quarters of
  offensive behaviour incidents involve intoxication
  ○ A review of crime statistics from 11 countries, 62% of
  offenders convicted of a violent crime had been consuming
  alcohol shortly before committing the crime – Murdoch et al.
  1990
  ○ Alcohol was more than twice as likely to be a contributing
  factor to violent crimes, compared to non-violent crimes
  ○ The magnitude of violence was related to the magnitude of
  consumption

Question 113

What are the four pharmacological links between alcohol and aggression?

Answer 113

○ Psychomotor stimulant effects
○ Interrupted threat detection
-Alterations in the pain system
○ Alterations of cognition

Question 114

Explain the psychomotor stimulant effect link between alcohol and aggression

Answer 114

§ Euphoria accompanying intoxication is rewarding, which is accompanied by increases in nervous system stimulation (eg increased HR, BP, respiration; also increases in sensation-seeking behaviours; and confrontational and provocative behaviours)

-Testing the approach behaviour:
Ask people to respond to the stimuli by pushing the joystick closer if it’s portrait, and away if it’s landscape
Are they more quick in responses to alcohol pictures than soft drinks?
So approach response is much stronger to alcohol for alcohol-dependent patients
Alcohol changes the way dependent people approach situations
To the point where people have tried to develop an intervention that retrains this response
◊ Tried to train people, by putting alcohol pictures in landscape so it is always required to be pulled away from - this seems to help people who are alcohol-dependent to withdraw and maintain that withdrawal from alcohol

Question 115

Explain the interrupted threat detection link between alcohol and aggression

Answer 115

Alcohol can alleviate subjective feelings of stress, most
likely due to the upregulation of GABA (gamma
aminobutyric acid) in the brain
Intoxication can result in diminishing appropriate levels of
stress and or fear
Animal studies demonstrate that alcohol infrequently
heightens aggression in lab animals
specifically characterised by increased proximity to a threat
Other drugs that have an anxiolytic effect (e.g., cannabis)
but are not linked to violence, also have a CNS
depressant effect
Hoaken et al 2003 – showed that the alcohol-aggression
relationship was mediated by the cardiovascular stress
response dampening by alcohol
® Judge conveys idea that this person is usually not aggressive, it is only under the influence of alcohol that the aggression came out

Question 116

What is the evidence for the interrupted threat detection link between intoxication and aggression?

Answer 116

-Subjects were 328 healthy social drinkers between 21 and 35
-dispositional aggressivity was measured using the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire, 29-item inventory that provides 4 sub-scales
◊ physical aggression
- verbal aggression
- anger
- hostility
® Measured on a 5-point likert scale

For this study the physical aggression subscale was used

◊ Issue with this approach, is that it was used with young people, so how much could the developmental stage influence this

◊ Social desirability bias

◊ Also demographic effects such as gender and sex could influence responses

◊ And how much insight does someone truly have over their own behaviour?
- Established the participants’ trait agression, then engaged in the Taylor Agression Paradigm

◊ Subjects are placed in a situation where electric shocks are received from and administered to a fictitious opponent during a competitive reaction-time task

◊ Physical aggression is indexed as the intensity of shocks administered to the opponent

◊ Given that aggression is highly related to provocation, the TAP has low and high provocation conditions

◊ Opponents are introduced at the beginning of the experiment and sit opposite throughout, they are same gender and race

◊ Pain thresholds are individually assessed and factored into shock intensity

RESULTS:
◊ Alcohol significantly increased aggressive behaviour in comparison to the placebo, for men but not women

◊ The effect of alcohol expectancies on aggression in men was rendered nonsignificant when statistically controlling for dispositional aggressivity

} “intoxicated aggression, in men, is primarily the result of alcohol’s pharmacological properties in conjunction with an aggressive disposition.”
	} So alcohol is necessary but not sufficient to produce aggression (it will not make people aggressive as a stand-alone, you have to have an aggressive disposition for the alcohol to create this effect)
	} So the comments by the judge about the aggressive behaviour only arising through alcohol, is not accurate

Question 117

Explain the alterations in pain detection link between intoxication and aggression

Answer 117

§ In the descending limb of alcohol intoxication pain
sensitivity is decreased
□ Alcohol was an early surgical anaesthetic
§ In the ascending limb of intoxication humans sensitivity
to pain increases (Gustafson, 1985, Gray, 1982)
§ The effect of alcohol is therefore thought to be
Paradoxical
□ Subjective experience of pain heightens self-reported irritation,
annoyance, anger and aggression towards another, even if the
source of pain cannot be attributed to them (Berkowitz and
Thome, 1987)
□ In the descending limb of intoxication the analgesia experienced
can block the painful aspects of aggression
□ So for example, the pain sensitivity reduction as someone continues drinking, may lead to exacerbated levels of violence and aggression as they become more intoicated, because they are not as sensitive to the pain

Question 118

Explain how alterations in cognition links intoxication and aggression

Answer 118

§ Alcohol is known to interfere with many aspects of
cognition, but the studies to understand the nature of this
relationship have only been conducted in the last 20
years
§ Early research examined a broad range of tests such as
reaction time, visual and auditory acuity, hand-eye co-
ordination, gross body movement, short term memory
□ This was to inform drink driving policy
§ Threshold or effective blood alcohol concentration (BAC)
□ The threshold at which the majority of subjects displayed a reliable
impairment for a given task

Question 119

How do cognition abilities relate to alcohol BAC?

Answer 119

• Reviews indicate that most behaviours
  experimentally tested have a threshold BAC of
  0.08%
  ○ E.g., simple reaction time
  
  • Higher-order cognitive functions, such as
    decision-making, judgement, memory have a
    reliable BAC threshold of 0.06%
  • More complex divided attention tasks that
    emphasise dual task performance, have a
    reliable BAC threshold of 0.05%
    ○ Holloway (1995), Kruger (1992), Mitchell (1985)

Question 120

What did simple reaction time tasks reveal about intoxication effects?

Answer 120

• Simple reaction time tasks showed intoxication
  slowed behavioural responses to stimuli
  ○ Motor issue
  ○ Flicker fusion task
  § Strobe-like flashing light that increases the ‘flicker’
  frequency until it gives the impression of a continuous
  stream of light, from a flicker to a fusion
  § With alcohol consumption the point at which subjects
  report the flicker to fusion transition is earlier
  □ Attributed to a slowing of neural processing
  somewhere in the visual processing system
  between the retina and visual cortex
  ○ Subtraction task
  § Start at 100 and subtract by 7 until you reach 0

Question 121

What processing stages is processing speed a product of, and how does this relate to intoxication?

Answer 121

• Processing speed is the conflation of three stages of
  processing
  ○ Perceptual, central, and motor
  § Early perceptual stages have been found to be least
  effected by intoxication
  § Central processing stages are most sensitive to
  Intoxication
  ○ Speed accuracy tradeoff
  § An intoxicated person will purposefully slow down in order to
  maintain or improve accuracy
  § Makes it difficult to assess at what stage of processing the
  intoxication is having an effect

Question 122

How could we avoid the speed-accuracy trade-off seen in intoxication studies?

Answer 122

• Trade-off problems involving performance speed are
  generally avoided by the use of divided attention tasks
  ○ Divided Attention Tasks
  § Assess the ability to performance two or more activities at once
  § For example a participant may be required to maintain a verbal working memory load while
  performing a stroop colour naming task
  § Or manually track a rotating target (pursuit task( while performing some auditory
  discrimination task (detecting differences amongst tones)
  
  • Performance in these tasks has been found to be highly
    vulnerable to alcohol intoxication, with threshold BACs of 0.05%
    or less
  • Performance of the individual task can often be unimpaired
    during intoxication, but when required to perform the tasks
    simultaneously performance decreases dramatically
    ○ Relevance to driving capacity

Question 123

What mechanisms lead to intoxication reducing behavioural control?

Answer 123

• Behavioural control is thought to be reduced during
  intoxication because of two sets of countervaling
  mechanisms: inhibitory and activational
  
  • Considerable research has examined the effects of alcohol
    intoxication on the ability to withhold a behavioural
    response
    – As a reflection of a more general inhibitory cognitive mechanism
    – Two cogniitive tasks have been used extensively, the stop-signal task and go/no-go task
  • These cognitive paradigms were chosen because of the deficits detected in
    clinical conditions featuring aggressive and impulsive behaviours, e.g.,
    antiscocial personality disorder
  • The other advantage is that these tasks also measure the countervailing
    influences of inhibitory (no-go or stop trials) and activational mechanisms (go
    trials or response speed)

Question 124

Who were the participants and what was the design for the study exploring alcohol impairment of behaviour in men and women?

Answer 124

§ 12 male and 12 female participants
§ 21 years of age (21-29years range)
§ Exclusion criteria included present or past history of substance dependence, psychiatric or medical condition
§ Participants fasted for 4 hours prior to testing
§ Abstained from alcohol for 24 hours prior
§ Men reported 2.6 drinking occasions per week, Women 1.6
§ Men consumed 1.4ml/kg of alcohol per occasion (6 standard drinks), women 0.8ml/kg (3 standard drinks)
□ In this version, participants saw a series of slides, then they saw a cue (Either landscape or portrait rectangle border), then a colour fills that cue (green is no-go, blue is go)
□ Orientation of the cue signalled the probability that a go or no-go
target would be displayed
□ Vertical cues were 20% predictive of no-go trials
□ Horizontal cues were 80% predictive of no-go trials
□ 250 trials
® Equal number of each cue-target combination at each SOA
□ One of the reasons they gave these predictive cues, is to give context for people’s successes and failures
® You can see whether they have capacity to prepare a response
® You would think it woul help more with slips rather than absolute failures, because they would be primed to respond in some way

Question 125

What was the procedure for the study exploring alcohol impairment of behaviour in men and women?

Answer 125

® Two sessions between 12pm and 6pm, no less than 24 hours and
no more than 7 days apart

◊ 7 days apart to control for other environmental confounding factors
® Prior to both sessions participants provided urine samples for drug testing and breath samples for BAC

® Performance were tested under two dose conditions
-0.65g/kg and placebo

® Doses were administered on separate sessions and counterbalanced across subjects

® Doses were calculated based on body weight and were administered as absolute alcohol divided equally into two drinks, each containing one part alcohol and 3 parts carbonated mix

® Subjects had one minute to finish each drink and drinks were served 4 minutes apart

® Produces peak BAC 50-70 minutes from drinking onset

® Placebo was served in the same manner but consisted of four parts
carbonated mix with 3ml of alcohol floating on the surface. The glasses were sprayed with an alcohol mist that resembled condensation and provided a strong alcoholic scent as the beverages were consumed

® Subjects were tested on the cued go/no-go task 30 minutes after drinking onset, with the 20 minute task concluded at 50 minutes post-drinking onset
◊ Trying to capture task performance as close to the peak effect as possible

® 36 subjects were initially recruited and 12 pairs of men and women were selected based on matching of equivalent BAC at 30 minutes post-onset of drinking

® 7 pairs had identical BAC

® 5 pairs had BAC differences less that 1mg/dl

Question 126

What were the results from the study exploring alcohol impairment of behaviour in men and women?

Answer 126

® P-inhibition is the proportion of no-go targets in which a subject failed to inhibit

® Across all participants:
◊ sig. main effect of dose
◊ Sig. main effect of cue
◊ No gender effect
◊ interaction between dose, cue and gender
◊ Men show more failures with alcohol, particularly in the go-cue condition
} Men specifically found it particularly hard to complete the task without cue warning

® sig. main cue on reaction time

® No other significant main or interaction effects

® Subjects rated the alcohol content of the active dose at 4.1 standard drinks, while the placebo was rated 0.8 std drinks
◊ So shows that participants knew when they had alcohol vs when they didn’t - why didn’t this trick them, and why does that matter?
} Maybe because they felt the effects of the alcohol, and they could witness their task performance
} Because the participants were familiar with the effects of the alcohol, they know what physiological signs are associated with alcohol
} While it may be a better idea, then, to do this task with people who have never had alcohol, this has ethical issues
} Because the placebo didn’t work, this could create an expectancy for the participants’ performance when they are intoxicated, which could exacerbate the effects

Question 127

What was the discussion from the study exploring alcohol impairment of behaviour in men and women?

Answer 127

® The impairment to inhibition was specific to the condition
presenting a misleading cue, especially for men
® The differences were not due to a speed accuracy tradeoff
® Men reported increased stimulation from alcohol and women
reported increased sedation, though these differences were not
reflected in response speed.

Question 128

Explain the effect of individual differences in inhibitory control impairment on the
go/no-go task, after receiving alcohol

Answer 128

○ individual differences in inhibitory control impairment on the
go/no-go task, after receiving alcohol (0.65g/kg) , predicted the
level of alcohol consumption when provided ‘ad lib’ drinking time
post-experiment
○ Correlation:
-R = .20
○ ^Basically provided them with alcohol and they sat in a room by themselves watching a movie/listening to music
§ This isn’t a very natural task, so other studies have looked at alcohol consumption in a bar, or had people self-report amount of alcohol they consumed in a day, and these findings have been replicated
○ Refers to the self-induced behavioural defense
§ The amount you consume after the first dose is not fully in someone’s control
§ But that is impacted severely by individual differences, so cannot be used to apply to individual people
○ Limitations
§ Gives general overview of how alcohol-behaviour interactions work, but they cannot be applied to individual behaviour

Question 129

How did alcohol impact attentional bias?

Answer 129

○ Attentional bias = when you are craving a particular substance, you will have a bias towards that subtance-related stimuli
§ Alcohol in small doses primed attentional bias, increasing the
dose diminishes the effect, possibly because these cues have
become less important

Question 130

What were the policy implications for impacts of alcohol on behaviour?

Answer 130

• If minimal levels of alcohol consumption results in disinhibition and
  drive to seek reward, particularly more alcohol, can subsequent levels
  of intoxication be entirely voluntary
• If moderate levels of alcohol appear to induce aggression in people
  with aggressive dispositions, especially men, should people who have
  demonstrated themselves to be aggressive while intoxicated be made
  to remain below 0.05% BAC?
• Can we assume that the decrement in inhibitory control suffered with
  moderate levels of intoxication (e.g. 0.09% BAC) will increase linearly
  to a point of absolute loss of control with continued alcohol
  consumption?
• Would a research study that attempted to measure inhibitory control at
  levels above 0.09% until the point of loss of control be ethical?
• How can a court decide on the relative level of mitigation that
  intoxication should afford a defendant, when the published literature
  suggests that there is a wide variation in the effect of BAC on individual
  differences in cognition?

Question 131

What is neuromarketing?

Answer 131

• Economics is the science of choice
  
  • Psychology is the science of behaviour and mind
  • Marketing is the ‘science’ of influence
  • ‘Neuromarketing’ loosely refers to the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other marketing areas
  • Reductionist assumption in this: people are their brain, and that’s where the decision making is happening. There is no distinction between the person and the brain, so you can specifically target someone’s decision-making process
    Problems with this decision: people’s behaviours are unpredictable, and we are not rational decision makers

Question 132

What are the 7 Ps of services marketing?

Answer 132

-People
-Physical evidence
-Process
-Promotion
-Product
-Price
-Place

Question 133

Are people’s shopping habits generally stable, or transient?

Answer 133

• “…once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to
  change them. There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old
  routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux.”
  ○ General sense that people are relatively stable.
  ○ Shopping habits are generally stable, but there a particular periods where someone might suddenly need a lot of new things (eg pregnancy, moving house, etc) - in these periods, people are more susceptible to buying things they would never have even considered buying, so they can be more influenced. So companies try to target these life periods for their advertising

Question 134

How are behavioural insights used in shopping departments?

Answer 134

• “Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S.
  Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to
  understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal
  habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. ”
  ○ Basically behavioural insight departments to understand shopping habits, and specific targeting (trying to target the right ‘stuff’ at someone right at the right time)
  
  • (talking about how companies will buy information about customer’s to more accurately target their advertising)

Question 135

How does Target use their algorithms to target advertising?

Answer 135

• Target uses their algorithms to identify when a woman is likely pregnant (from the vitamins they buy, buying unscented lotions etc), and target their advertising accordingly. They can even guess when the due date is. So they will send out coupons and advertising that are directed towards pregnancy products. But, they found that pregnant women are not likely to use these coupons if they are getting highly targeted pregnancy ads when the women didn’t tell target they were pregnant, and they won’t use the coupons. So target has started giving them these targeted ads alongside random products such as lawnmowers, so the targeted advertising seems random, and the women are more likely to buy the products/use the coupons

Question 136

What are the 4 Ps of marketing?

Answer 136

• Product
  ○ What is being sold. How does it meet consumer needs? How is it branded
  
  • Pricing
    ○ What is the appropriate price for the product?
  • Place
    ○ What’s the best way to get the product to the consumer?
  • Promotion
    ○ How should the consumer learn about the product?

Question 137

What are the policies of the 4 marketing Ps?

Answer 137

• Product policy: the heart of marketing
  ○ How a company determines what products to offer in what context, to which
  Individuals
  ○ Usual market research uses surveys. These are unreliable as they do not always track preferences (neuroscience may help)
  
  • Price policy:
    ○ Higher prices may be perceived at as a disincentive to buy a product, but it could also be viewed as a market of product quality
    ○ ‘Willingness to pay’ is individually computed –> subjective value (neuroscience may help)
  • Communication policy
    ○ The efficacy of ads is not especially clear (change in purchasing in markets where ads were run - neuroscience may help)
    ○ Participants who received beta-blockers recalled less detail about ads (drug blocked emotional arousal)
    § Ads try to engage people emotionally, to make them remember the ads and the product
  • Distribution policy
    ○ Framing effect is utilised to advantage the company
    ○ Bonuses for loyal customers

Question 138

What is the value of branding?

Answer 138

• “the process of creating a relationship or a connection between a company’s
  product and emotional perception of the customer for the purpose of
  generating segregation among competition and building loyalty among
  customers.”
  
  • The more effective a company is at branding their product, the more likely they are to create people who are brand-loyal
  • The brand itself is valued (not even necessarily the company, but the brand in and of itself)
    ○ Eg, if Apple started making soft drinks, people would buy them. Not because they think these drinks would be good, but because it’s Apple

Question 139

What is geographical segmentation?

Answer 139

• Some places in the US (eg Florida), refer to all soft drinks as Coke
  
  • The more that a company knows about someone and where they are from, is really important to how they advertise to people
    ○ In this example, if a company is advertising soft drinks across the US, they have to make separate ads with tailored soft drink names according to the locations
    ○ So it’s about how the company can break down and specify their client base, and how they can reach them

Question 140

What is an example of how geographical segmentation can go awry?

Answer 140

○ The reason hospital MRIs cost more, is because people feel that their MRI is more urgent in a hospital, so they can charge more
○ The fact that even the discrepancy changes across locations says a lot about how much places believe they can charge people

Question 141

What is psychological segmentation?

Answer 141

• Looking at people’s activity online, classifying those groups, and targeting advertising to groups according to who is most likely to share etc

Question 142

What did cambridge analytica do as an example of data sharing and analytics going awry?

Answer 142

○ Cambridge analytica utilised information for how people were engaging on facebook, to target advertising for voting for a particular presidential candidate in a US election

Question 143

How has economics entwined with marketing?

Answer 143

• Since companies are ultimately interested in influencing choice (marketing) and
  economics is interested in understanding choice itself, they are a natural pair.
  
  • The inclusion of psychology provides a framework within which to conduct experiments towards the above goals

Question 144

How to know where to exert influence in marketing

Answer 144

• Individual level - influencing individual directly, getting individual people to buy the products
  ○ Depending on the size of the company, this may not be the best idea, because individuals can require a lot of time and resources, and are less predictable
  
  • Can segment and think about the group (eg pregnant people)
  • Or think about the general market and society
    ○ Influencing public perception (eg drawing from Volvo’s perception (swedish), and relying on the potential to utilise that safe engineering association with Swedish engineers, to German engineering and influence the public perceptions that way)

Question 145

What is the evidence for nudging?

Answer 145

• Evidence is good (d=0.43), unless you adjust for publication bias (d=0.04)
  ○ So when we only looked at significant studies, the effect was big, but when all findings were looked at, effect size was not big
  ○ But even though there may not be heaps of evidence for it, if a company has enough money for it, they may as well give it a try

Question 146

What is a type I error?

Answer 146

False positive

Question 147

What is a type II error?

Answer 147

False negative

Question 148

What is publication bias?

Answer 148

○ Large effects don’t need big samples, small effects need large samples
○ If we are talking about there being a true effect, the p-value will always be 0
○ But, with publication bias, there will be a lot more noise right around the significance threshold
○ You would expect the effect to be more readily observed with a true effect (more studies that are bigger should get more studies with smaller p-values)
○ So you can look at p-values when looking for publication biases

Question 149

What is neurally informed marketing?

Answer 149

○ Idea that rather than doing behavioural segmentation, we could do neural segmentation - using patterns of brain activity to segment people
§ But issue is, if the brain activity isn’t reflected in the behaviour, why do it?

Question 150

How are preferences reflected in brani activity?

Answer 150

○ Looked at people’s stated preferences to pepsi or coke, and whether that corresponds to their brain activity responses to pepsi or coke
§ Found that there wasn’t much of a difference in how their preferences determined whether they chose pepsi or coke, but their brain activity did predict it
§ Issue is brain activity scans are expensive and not viable for every-day targeting techniques

Question 151

How does someone’s liking change depending on whether they have or have not purchased the product?

Answer 151

• People were sold the product, and asked how much they liked it after they purchased it vs asking whether people think the product is worth the price prior to buying it
  ○ Answers are different
  ○ If someone has already committed to buying it, we are very good at justifying that decision by making up a story to make sense of their behaviour

Question 152

What are some options for brain-related data?

Answer 152

• “An EEG (electroencephalogram) reads brain-cell activity using sensors placed
  on the subject’s scalp; it can track changes in activity over fractions of a second,
  but it does a poor job of pinpointing exactly where the activity occurs or
  measuring it in deep, subcortical regions of the brain (where a lot of interesting
  activity takes place). EEG equipment, typically costs about $20,000.”
  
  • “An fMRI can peer deep into the brain but is cumbersome, and it tracks activity
    only over the course of several seconds, which may miss fleeting neural
    incidents…fMRI machines…typically cost about $5 million with high overhead”
  • Other techniques are available that may not be as reliable as an MRI, but might be more viable and accessible
    ○ Eg eye-tracking
  • Can give a bit more predictive validity in people’s purchase choices than merely surveys etc

Question 153

Describe neurocinematics

Answer 153

○ ^ to what extent can we predict people’s responses to film to guide how these films are then designed (eg what ending should it have to make people like it more etc)
○ Can have people in an MRI scene watching movies while scanning their brain activity to gauge their reactions

Question 154

What do people think about neuroimaging for marketing?

Answer 154

• “The prevailing attitude…can be summarized as… ‘neuroscience either tells me
  what I already know, or it tells me something new that I don’t care
  about.’”(Ming Hsu - UC Berkeley)
  ○ do marketers really need to be told that
  people’s brains react differently to Coke and Pepsi to understand the
  importance of branding?
  ○ This is basically saying, that for the cost of brain imaging, are these studies telling us enough for this to be worth it? Probably not

Question 155

What is perception?

Answer 155

Perception is more than just sensation
What happens in your brain, is you flipping between perceiving a vase and perceiving a face even though the visual stimuli is exactly the same either way
○ It is not merely passively registering sensory input - it involves interpretation based on what is causing the image you are seeing

-it is an ACTIVE process

Question 156

What is the Kanizsa illusion?

Answer 156

○ There are actual no triangles in this image - we are just filling in information as if the lines continued

Question 157

What does perception depend on?

Answer 157

-Previous experience: How we see depends on expectations and previous experience - once you have seen the dog separated, it is more easy to see it in the image

-Perception defaults to hardwired beliefs: In this case, our hardwired belief is that light comes from above, which means we will see the foot print/outprint according to where we assume the light is coming from

Question 158

Describe the Bayesian Framework for perception

Answer 158

• It basically says that your brain is very good at filling in an image based on our contextual information (eg in a dark room, you will rely on your memory rather than sight) - so humans use both prior knowledge and beliefs as well as what is available to use
  ○ We combine this information to make perceptual decisions
  
  • Perception is an active predictive process
  • According to the Bayesian Brain hypothesis, sensory information is represented probabilistically
  • Human use prior knowledge and uncertainty to guide perception/decisions

Question 159

Describe audio visual integration for perception

Answer 159

• Illustrates hwo we integrate informaton from our auditory processing (audition) and our sight vision
  ○ Eg when someone is talking, you generally look at their mouth as well as listen to what they sya to best understand them
  ○ If one source of info is more reliable than another, we will put more weighting on that input (eg if it is looking at an object, we will place more weight on vision)
  ○ The precision distributions for perceiving objects in space of these inputs are displayed in that gaussian distribution
  § So visual is very precise but not very likely for direction
  § Auditory is not as precise, but more accurate for direction
  § Our actual perception (the combination) is in between the two, but closer to the visual input because it is more precise

Question 160

Describe a Bayesian distribution for perception

Answer 160

○ ^ Green is our belief of where an object is in space, the blue is the likelihood of where that object is in space, and red is the combination (combination of both) which will be closer to the more precise info (whichever is more of a narrow distribution)
○ Because the green is very narrow, you would have a high prediction error because obviously the posterior isn’t completely aligned with your prior expectation which you were very sure about (because it is narrow). If the red was closer to blue, but the green was a less precise distribution, then the surprise wouldn’t be as high because you wouldn’t be as sure of your prior expectations
○ Posterior is your best gues at what is happening based on your prior belief and what you perceive (the likelihood). Your posterior will then be the prior for the next exposure to this stimulus

Question 161

Explain how perception information was studied

Answer 161

○ Had to guess where a coin hit the water based on the splashes (the lights blue points)
○ People are told that the thrower was pointing at the middle of the pond, so their guesses are based on that fact (their prior is that the coin should be in the middle)

	○ Varied the precision, prior, and likelihood info given the participants. 
	○ The prior is manipulated by the 'goodness' of the throw (ie they're aiming for the middle, but can they actually get the middle?
	○ The likelihood can be manipulated by varying the spread of the splashes

Question 162

What was found from the coin perception study?

Answer 162

§ People use info from both the fact that te thrower is aiming at the centre, and they can gauge from multiple trials how accurate they tend to be in their throw
§ They are also using information about the dot distribution to gauge where the coin might be
§ If people were just using the prior info that the thrower was aiming at the middle, their estimates would always be in the middle of the pond (horizontal line)
§ If they were just using likelihood info (from the dots), they would always place the coin in th emiddle of the splash dots (middle diagonal dotted line)
§ What we actually see, is something in the middle - people are using both information sources for their information
§ With a more accurate thrower, the responses were closer to the flat line, which shows that their responses are weighting their prior which was more precise
§ With a narrow splash spread (narrow likelihood), the distribution of guess was closer to the perfect likelihood line, showing that they are weighting the info from the likelihood more
§ So overall, shows that people place more weight on the most precise information source, but still use a combination of both
§ Can look at the slope of the guess distributions to see how much people are weighting their information sources

Question 163

What is the link between the Kanizsa illusion and neurodivergence?

Answer 163

People with Autism less prone to the Kanizsa illusion.

* So what is going on? Are people with autism placing more weight on the information directly in front of them, or are their prios less precise?

Question 164

What are the theories for sensory overload and Autism?

Answer 164

§ One theory is that the sensory information is encoded very precisely, meaning the likelihood is very precise and the orange is shifted to the sensory information (precise likelihood model = C)
§ Another model is that the sensory overload is driven by imprecise prior understandings/memories (hypo priors model = B)
§ Either way, you would get the exact same outcome of sensory overload
□ This is why if you only look at symptoms, you cannot always understand the underlying mechanisms?
□ Important to know, because if you can understand what the underlying mechanisms are, you can tailor learning approaches and treatment approaches
□ But can we use computational modelling to understand the mechanisms underpinning this same mechanism

Question 165

How were the precise likelihood model, and hypo priors model tested for sensory perception in people with Autism?

Answer 165

○ Same coin toss task as earlier
○ No statistical difference between neurotypical participants and participants with Autism
§ Could reject the models, but it also had a very small sample
○ When placing the likelihood variance mapped onto a spectrum according to Autism Quotient scores, you can see a clustered spread (and this was with a doubled sample size)
○ Negative relationship - the more autistic traits someone has, the more precise their sensory encoding is
§ In line with the precise likelihood model

Question 166

Summarise the overall goal and findings of the psychosis perceptual model study

Answer 166

• Goal of current study:
  
  • To find a middle ground between the precise likelihood model and the hypo-priors model for psychosis presentations in a non-clinical population

Translation of findings:
* Psychosis associated with more overweighting of likelihood, even though when they had very imprecise priors, their likelihoods had a lot more noise
* Suggests both weaker bottom-up (likelihood encoding) and top-down (prior reliance) processing which results in more noise in general perception, as well as difficulties in updating of the priors so implies not much learning from the sensory input