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Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence

Chierchia, Gabriele; Soukupová, Magdaléna; Kilford, Emma J; Griffin, Cait; Leung, Jovita; Palminteri, Stefano; Blakemore, Sarah-Jayne; (2022) Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence. Developmental Science , Article e13330. 10.1111/desc.13330. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Understanding how learning changes during human development has been one of the long-standing objectives of developmental science. Recently, advances in computational biology have demonstrated that humans display a bias when learning to navigate novel environments through rewards and punishments: they learn more from outcomes that confirm their expectations than from outcomes that disconfirm them. Here, we ask whether confirmatory learning is stable across development, or whether it might be attenuated in developmental stages in which exploration is beneficial, such as in adolescence. In a reinforcement learning task, 77 participants aged 11-32 years (4 men, mean age = 16.26) attempted to maximize monetary rewards by repeatedly sampling different pairs of novel options, which varied in their reward/punishment probabilities. Mixed-effect models showed an age-related increase in accuracy as long as learning contingencies remained stable across trials, but less so when they reversed halfway through the trials. Age was also associated with a greater tendency to stay with an option that had just delivered a reward, more than to switch away from an option that had just delivered a punishment. At the computational level, a confirmation model provided increasingly better fit with age. This model showed that age differences are captured by decreases in noise or exploration, rather than in the magnitude of the confirmation bias. These findings provide new insights into how learning changes during development and could help better tailor learning environments to people of different ages. Reinforcement learning shows age-related improvement during adolescence, but more in stable learning environments compared with volatile learning environments. People tend to stay with winning options more than they shift away from losing ones, and this asymmetry increases with age during adolescence. Computationally, these changes are captured by a developing confirmatory learning style, in which people learn more from outcomes that confirm rather than disconfirm their choices. Age-related differences in confirmatory learning are explained by decreases in stochasticity, rather than changes in the magnitude of the confirmation bias.

Type: Article
Title: Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/desc.13330
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13330
Language: English
Additional information: © 2021 The Authors. Developmental Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Confirmation bias, adolescence, computational modelling, exploration, learning rates, reinforcement learning
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10156943
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