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Guseva M, Bogler C, Allefeld C, Haynes JD. Instruction effects on randomness in sequence generation. Front Psychol 2023; 14:1113654. [PMID: 37034908 PMCID: PMC10075230 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1113654] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/01/2022] [Accepted: 02/20/2023] [Indexed: 04/11/2023] Open
Abstract
Randomness is a fundamental property of human behavior. It occurs both in the form of intrinsic random variability, say when repetitions of a task yield slightly different behavioral outcomes, or in the form of explicit randomness, say when a person tries to avoid being predicted in a game of rock, paper and scissors. Randomness has frequently been studied using random sequence generation tasks (RSG). A key finding has been that humans are poor at deliberately producing random behavior. At the same time, it has been shown that people might be better randomizers if randomness is only an implicit (rather than an explicit) requirement of the task. We therefore hypothesized that randomization performance might vary with the exact instructions with which randomness is elicited. To test this, we acquired data from a large online sample (n = 388), where every participant made 1,000 binary choices based on one of the following instructions: choose either randomly, freely, irregularly, according to an imaginary coin toss or perform a perceptual guessing task. Our results show significant differences in randomness between the conditions as quantified by conditional entropy and estimated Markov order. The randomization scores were highest in the conditions where people were asked to be irregular or mentally simulate a random event (coin toss) thus yielding recommendations for future studies on randomization behavior.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maja Guseva
- Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- Department of Psychology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- *Correspondence: Maja Guseva,
| | - Carsten Bogler
- Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
| | - Carsten Allefeld
- Department of Psychology, City University of London, London, United Kingdom
| | - John-Dylan Haynes
- Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- Department of Psychology, City University of London, London, United Kingdom
- Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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Chronic nicotine increases midbrain dopamine neuron activity and biases individual strategies towards reduced exploration in mice. Nat Commun 2021; 12:6945. [PMID: 34836948 PMCID: PMC8635406 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27268-7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/23/2021] [Accepted: 11/04/2021] [Indexed: 11/09/2022] Open
Abstract
Long-term exposure to nicotine alters brain circuits and induces profound changes in decision-making strategies, affecting behaviors both related and unrelated to drug seeking and consumption. Using an intracranial self-stimulation reward-based foraging task, we investigated in mice the impact of chronic nicotine on midbrain dopamine neuron activity and its consequence on the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. Model-based and archetypal analysis revealed substantial inter-individual variability in decision-making strategies, with mice passively exposed to nicotine shifting toward a more exploitative profile compared to non-exposed animals. We then mimicked the effect of chronic nicotine on the tonic activity of dopamine neurons using optogenetics, and found that photo-stimulated mice adopted a behavioral phenotype similar to that of mice exposed to chronic nicotine. Our results reveal a key role of tonic midbrain dopamine in the exploration/exploitation trade-off and highlight a potential mechanism by which nicotine affects the exploration/exploitation balance and decision-making.
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Planton S, van Kerkoerle T, Abbih L, Maheu M, Meyniel F, Sigman M, Wang L, Figueira S, Romano S, Dehaene S. A theory of memory for binary sequences: Evidence for a mental compression algorithm in humans. PLoS Comput Biol 2021; 17:e1008598. [PMID: 33465081 PMCID: PMC7845997 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008598] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/09/2020] [Revised: 01/29/2021] [Accepted: 12/01/2020] [Indexed: 01/29/2023] Open
Abstract
Working memory capacity can be improved by recoding the memorized information in a condensed form. Here, we tested the theory that human adults encode binary sequences of stimuli in memory using an abstract internal language and a recursive compression algorithm. The theory predicts that the psychological complexity of a given sequence should be proportional to the length of its shortest description in the proposed language, which can capture any nested pattern of repetitions and alternations using a limited number of instructions. Five experiments examine the capacity of the theory to predict human adults' memory for a variety of auditory and visual sequences. We probed memory using a sequence violation paradigm in which participants attempted to detect occasional violations in an otherwise fixed sequence. Both subjective complexity ratings and objective violation detection performance were well predicted by our theoretical measure of complexity, which simply reflects a weighted sum of the number of elementary instructions and digits in the shortest formula that captures the sequence in our language. While a simpler transition probability model, when tested as a single predictor in the statistical analyses, accounted for significant variance in the data, the goodness-of-fit with the data significantly improved when the language-based complexity measure was included in the statistical model, while the variance explained by the transition probability model largely decreased. Model comparison also showed that shortest description length in a recursive language provides a better fit than six alternative previously proposed models of sequence encoding. The data support the hypothesis that, beyond the extraction of statistical knowledge, human sequence coding relies on an internal compression using language-like nested structures.
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Affiliation(s)
- Samuel Planton
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin center, Gif/Yvette, France
| | - Timo van Kerkoerle
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin center, Gif/Yvette, France
| | - Leïla Abbih
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin center, Gif/Yvette, France
| | - Maxime Maheu
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin center, Gif/Yvette, France
- Université de Paris, Paris, France
| | - Florent Meyniel
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin center, Gif/Yvette, France
| | - Mariano Sigman
- Laboratorio de Neurociencia, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnicas), Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Facultad de Lenguas y Educacion, Universidad Nebrija, Madrid, Spain
| | - Liping Wang
- Institute of Neuroscience, Key Laboratory of Primate Neurobiology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
| | - Santiago Figueira
- CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnicas), Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Departamento de Computacion, Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Sergio Romano
- CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnicas), Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Departamento de Computacion, Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Stanislas Dehaene
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin center, Gif/Yvette, France
- Collège de France, Paris, France
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Treviño M, Medina-Coss Y León R. Distributed processing of side-choice biases. Brain Res 2020; 1749:147138. [PMID: 33002485 DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2020.147138] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/03/2020] [Revised: 08/25/2020] [Accepted: 09/23/2020] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
Abstract
Psychophysics describes how variations in stimulus strength lead to changes in perceptual performance. Yet, the contribution of non-sensory information processing to perceptual decision making is still not fully understood. For instance, in two-alternative forced-choice tasks, observers can exhibit tendencies to choose more one alternative over another, with no apparent goal or function. Such choice biases are highly prevalent in mice and, in free-choice tasks, they are insensitive to changes in stimulus discriminability. Thus, a reasonable proposal is that these side-choice biases could derive from functional asymmetries in sensory processing, decision making, or both. Here, we explored how different circuits participate in the production of choice biases in adult mice. We found that the magnitude of the changes in biased choice behavior depended on the inactivated region. Indeed, contralateral, but not ipsilateral, inactivations of the primary visual and posterior parietal cortices reduced the probability of mice choosing their preferred side. In contrast, ipsilateral inactivations of the subtantia nigra pars reticulata and of the frontal orienting fields, reduced and increased the probabilities of mice choosing their preferred side, respectively. These results demonstrate that internal circuit processing contributes to side-choice behavior and illustrates how distinct brain regions could participate in producing normal to aberrant levels of choice variability.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mario Treviño
- Laboratorio de Plasticidad Cortical y Aprendizaje Perceptual, Instituto de Neurociencias, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
| | - Ricardo Medina-Coss Y León
- Laboratorio de Plasticidad Cortical y Aprendizaje Perceptual, Instituto de Neurociencias, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
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