Cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans. Export

@article{citeulike:702349, abstract = {Decision making in an uncertain environment poses a conflict between the opposing demands of gathering and exploiting information. In a classic illustration of this 'exploration-exploitation' dilemma, a gambler choosing between multiple slot machines balances the desire to select what seems, on the basis of accumulated experience, the richest option, against the desire to choose a less familiar option that might turn out more advantageous (and thereby provide information for improving future decisions). Far from representing idle curiosity, such exploration is often critical for organisms to discover how best to harvest resources such as food and water. In appetitive choice, substantial experimental evidence, underpinned by computational reinforcement learning (RL) theory, indicates that a dopaminergic, striatal and medial prefrontal network mediates learning to exploit. In contrast, although exploration has been well studied from both theoretical and ethological perspectives, its neural substrates are much less clear. Here we show, in a gambling task, that human subjects' choices can be characterized by a computationally well-regarded strategy for addressing the explore/exploit dilemma. Furthermore, using this characterization to classify decisions as exploratory or exploitative, we employ functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the frontopolar cortex and intraparietal sulcus are preferentially active during exploratory decisions. In contrast, regions of striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex exhibit activity characteristic of an involvement in value-based exploitative decision making. The results suggest a model of action selection under uncertainty that involves switching between exploratory and exploitative behavioural modes, and provide a computationally precise characterization of the contribution of key decision-related brain systems to each of these functions.}, author = {Daw, Nathaniel D. and O'Doherty, John P. and Dayan, Peter and Seymour, Ben and Dolan, Raymond J.}, citeulike-article-id = {702349}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature04766}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature04766}, citeulike-linkout-2 = {http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16778890}, citeulike-linkout-3 = {http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=16778890}, day = {15}, doi = {10.1038/nature04766}, issn = {1476-4687}, journal = {Nature}, keywords = {explore-exploit, fmri, human, reinforcement-learning}, month = {June}, number = {7095}, pages = {876--879}, posted-at = {2008-10-31 18:29:56}, priority = {2}, publisher = {Nature Publishing Group}, title = {Cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans.}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature04766}, volume = {441}, year = {2006} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:702349 L3 - citeulike-article-id:702349 N2 - Decision making in an uncertain environment poses a conflict between the opposing demands of gathering and exploiting information. In a classic illustration of this 'exploration-exploitation' dilemma, a gambler choosing between multiple slot machines balances the desire to select what seems, on the basis of accumulated experience, the richest option, against the desire to choose a less familiar option that might turn out more advantageous (and thereby provide information for improving future decisions). Far from representing idle curiosity, such exploration is often critical for organisms to discover how best to harvest resources such as food and water. In appetitive choice, substantial experimental evidence, underpinned by computational reinforcement learning (RL) theory, indicates that a dopaminergic, striatal and medial prefrontal network mediates learning to exploit. In contrast, although exploration has been well studied from both theoretical and ethological perspectives, its neural substrates are much less clear. Here we show, in a gambling task, that human subjects' choices can be characterized by a computationally well-regarded strategy for addressing the explore/exploit dilemma. Furthermore, using this characterization to classify decisions as exploratory or exploitative, we employ functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the frontopolar cortex and intraparietal sulcus are preferentially active during exploratory decisions. In contrast, regions of striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex exhibit activity characteristic of an involvement in value-based exploitative decision making. The results suggest a model of action selection under uncertainty that involves switching between exploratory and exploitative behavioural modes, and provide a computationally precise characterization of the contribution of key decision-related brain systems to each of these functions. IS - 7095 JF - Nature SN - 1476-4687 EP - 879 TI - Cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans. PB - Nature Publishing Group VL - 441 SP - 876 KW - explore-exploit KW - fmri KW - human KW - reinforcement-learning AU - Daw, Nathaniel AU - O'Doherty, John AU - Dayan, Peter AU - Seymour, Ben AU - Dolan, Raymond PY - 2006/06/15/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature04766 ER -