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Poster B38 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Brain Development of Selective Attention Enhances Credit Assignment
Wei Chen1,3, Yukun Qu2, Xiaoyu Zhou2, Yuko Yotsumoto3, Yunzhe Liu1,2 (); 1Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing, China, 2Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, 3The University of Tokyo
A fundamental challenge of interacting with natural environment is to know what to learn. Previous studies have suggested that the learning of stimulus-outcome associations is related to the function of lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC). The ability of credit assignment may be enhanced by lOFC through increasing the specificity of learning. The present study validates such idea by investigating the development of brain in relation to the change of cognitive processes in a reinforcement learning task. We designed a novel behavioral paradigm in which correctly assigning credit is critical for decision making. We quantitatively assessed participants' learning propensities using reinforcement learning models, and found that age-related credit assignment processes are influenced both by focusing attention to identify task-relevant features, and by shifting attention away from irrelevant features. Our structural MRI data showed that only the development of later is specifically mediated by the change of thickness in lOFC.
Keywords: development credit assignment lOFC cognitive map