The influence of the outcome on predictive learning

• Applicant: Dr. Anna Thorwart
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2014 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 256632786

Humans (and non-human animals) learn automatically and with little effort about relationships between events. They have evolved this capacity because knowledge about such relationships allows them to predict (and thereby control) both appetitive and aversive outcomes of other events or their own behavior. The current project focuses on an important but often overlooked component: the influence of the outcome itself on such predictive learning. In particular, the project investigates how knowledge about the prior predictability of the outcome biases future learning. After having established that such a learning bias towards predictability exists in a previous project, the current project will concentrate on two possible mechanisms. First, effects of unpredictability on the outcome’s motivational features might mediate the learning bias. Second, outcome predictability effects might be products of reasoning processes and higher-order inferences. The present project will thereby contribute new insights into the means by which objective external experience is encoded into stored subjective mental representations. More specifically, the project will provide insights as to how this encoding process is systematically biased, and thus may result in networks of mental associations that are only imprecise representations of the individuals’ objective experience. Moreover, discovering the mechanisms by which prioritization takes place – the primary research objective of this project – will help to improve mathematical models of human predictive learning that are currently insufficiently equipped to explain the bias. Furthermore, the candidate mechanisms investigated in this project relate predictive learning to different sub-disciplines within psychology. The first proposed mechanism links learning effects to motivational and incentive mechanisms in humans (for example during choice behavior). The second hypothesized mechanism about reasoning processes links the current project to research on higher-order cognitive processes and will contribute to the ongoing theoretical debate about whether all kind of predictive learning is based on the same basic (associative) learning process or if some (or indeed all) forms of human predictive learning are controlled by other processes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Australia
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Oren Griffiths; Professor Dr. Harald Lachnit; Dr. Evan Livesey