Neural mechanisms of stable and transient hierarchy on social decision making

稳定和瞬态层次结构对社会决策的神经机制

• 批准号: 10678818
• 负责人: Jaime Jorge Fernando Castrellon
• 金额: $ 8.61万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-07-01 至 2027-05-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10678818
• 关键词: Affect; Affective; Age; Alternative Therapies; Animals; Anterior; Behavior; Behavioral; Belief; Brain; Brain region; Characteristics; Child; Clinical; Cognitive; Communities; Complex; Computer Models; Corpus striatum structure; Cost Sharing; Cues; Data; Decision Making; Diagnostic; Dimensions; Disease; Dopamine; Economics; Elements; Emotions; Employee; Environment; Evaluation; Exhibits; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Future; Gender; Goals; Health Personnel; Hospitals; Human; Individual; Insula of Reil; Intervention; Learning; Life; Link; MRI Scans; Medical; Mental Processes; Monitor; Multivariate Analysis; Occupations; Outcome; Parents; Participant; Patients; Pattern; Perception; Performance at work; Persons; Positioning Attribute; Prefrontal Cortex; Process; Psychopathology; Research; Rewards; Role; Sampling; Schizophrenia; Shapes; Social Behavior; Social Dominance; Social Environment; Social Functioning; Social Hierarchy; Social Interaction; Social Power; Social Processes; Social status; Societies; Socioeconomic Status; Source; System; Testing; Time; Trust; Update; Work; Workplace; autism spectrum disorder; career; cognitive process; competitive environment; cost; design; emotion regulation; experience; experimental study; flexibility; insight; learning ability; mentalization; neural; neural circuit; neural patterning; neuroimaging; neuromechanism; preference; psychologic; social; social deficits; social disparities; social influence; social learning; teacher; trait

Project Summary This application seeks to understand how temporally-dynamic information is incorporated into social decisions by investigating the influence of social hierarchy on basic neural and cognitive processes engaged in valuation and learning. While some kinds of social information are stable, others can fluctuate in a way that can shift a social context. Hierarchy, or the organization of individuals according to power and status, is a common feature of most social animal species including humans and is a kind of social information that can exhibit both stable and transient qualities. Knowing a person’s place in society may shape an individual’s decisions to trust or learn from them. Critically, deficits in social decisions, broadly, are observed in psychopathologies ranging from autism to schizophrenia and potentially, such deficits might arise from maladaptive monitoring and integration of time-varying social features such as hierarchy. While stable hierarchical identities like socioeconomic status or gender could influence a person’s decision to trust or learn from professionals like medical doctors or teachers, situational contexts can further transiently increase or decrease perceived differences in power or status (e.g., being at a hospital or in a classroom). The intersection between these stable and transient features of hierarchy are especially important because power dynamics may engage distinct or overlapping mental processes. For instance, patients might be more proactive in suggesting alternative therapies if they perceive healthcare providers to be of similar social status. These processes might further modulate different kinds of decisions depending on implicit goals. Affiliative and competitive goals might be under dissociable influence of hierarchy if the neural and cognitive processes involved in the decisions only partially overlap. While traditional psychological experiments have investigated human social decisions using anonymous or unknown partners (which offers important experimental control), this limitation is detached from real-world scenarios in which humans acquire dynamic information about the people with whom they are interacting. Studying the neural mechanisms involved in these decisions can provide information about the basic cognitive processes that contribute to maladaptive decision making. Specifically, computations in brain regions like the striatum, prefrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction supporting reward maximization over costs, mentalizing, and learning abilities are important for interactions with others. Notably, the functional roles of these regions are consistently implicated in clinical disorders like schizophrenia and autism, which share common social behavior deficits. Therefore, understanding the brain mechanisms involved in the integration of social hierarchy with learning and decision making can provide transdiagnostic insight about social behavior. This examination of interactions between psychological constructs like reward valuation and learning with social processes achieves and extends the goals of the Research Domains Criteria (RDoC) Initiative by considering the temporal elements of social context at the neural and cognitive levels. Aim 1 of this proposal will investigate how stable and transient social information is integrated in decisions with affiliative goals. Here, participants will make decisions about sharing rewards in a distribution game. Specific hypotheses will be tested by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational modelling to test whether neural representations can distinguish costly sharing of rewards between oneself and others when information is provided about others’ social status and power in both stable and transient domains. Aim 2 will extend these mechanisms to a competitive social learning context. During fMRI, participants will perform a task that permits evaluation of complex belief learning from decisions made by opponents. Hypotheses will evaluate whether brain mechanisms supporting social learning depend on competitors’ perceived status and power. Studying these processes in the same participants who complete the experiment in Aim 1 will further allow comparison of hierarchical identity representation. Specific test will evaluate whether humans form latent representations that change depending on the context across different dimensions: affiliative versus competitive goals, stable hierarchy position, and transient hierarchy position. Finally, Aim 3 will investigate how these neural representations relate to daily social interactions and personal experiences with social inequality. When interacting with others whose perceived hierarchy is either ambiguous or different than one’s own, humans tend to deploy emotion regulation strategies. Deficits in emotion regulation abilities, however, are symptomatic of a range of psychopathologies. Therefore, here we will identify whether neural representations of social hierarchy are related to daily life social-hierarchy related emotion regulation and abilities to mentalize the intentions of people who vary in social hierarchy. The correspondence of brain mechanisms to real-world decisions outside of the lab can inform potential future interventions that alleviate social decision-making deficits in psychopathology. Overall, this proposal has been designed to combine the candidate’s expertise in functional neuroimaging and economic decision making to prepare the candidate for an independent research career focused on neural mechanisms of social decision making.

项目摘要 该应用程序旨在通过研究社会等级制度对从事价值和学习的基本神经和认知过程的影响，以了解如何将暂时动态信息纳入社会决策中。尽管某些社会信息稳定，但其他社会信息可以以可以改变社会环境的方式波动。层次结构或根据权力和地位组织的个人组织是包括人类在内的大多数社会动物物种的共同特征，并且是一种可以表现出稳定和短暂品质的社会信息。了解一个人在社会中的位置可能会塑造个人的决定，以信任或向他们学习。至关重要的是，从自闭症到精神分裂症的心理病理学中，在社会决策中进行了广泛的定义，可能是由于不良适应性的监测和时间变化的社会特征（例如层次结构）引起的这种不足。尽管诸如社会经济地位或性别之类的稳定等级身份可能会影响一个人的决定或向医生或老师等专业人士学习的决定，但情境环境可以进一步暂时增加或减少感知到的权力或状况差异（例如，在医院或在课堂上或在课堂上）。这些稳定的层次结构和瞬态特征之间的交集尤其重要，因为动力动态可能会参与不同或重叠的心理过程。例如，如果患者认为医疗保健提供者具有相似的社会地位，则可能会更积极地提出替代疗法。这些过程可能会根据隐性目标进一步调节各种决策。如果在决策中涉及的神经和认知过程仅部分重叠，则会员和竞争目标可能会受到层次结构的可分离影响。尽管传统的心理实验使用匿名或不知名的伴侣（提供重要的实验控制）调查了人类的社会决策，但这种限制与现实情况相关，其中人类获得了有关与之互动的人们的动态信息。研究这些决策所涉及的神经机制可以提供有关导致适应不良决策的基本认知过程的信息。具体而言，诸如纹状体，前额叶皮层和颞叶交界处的大脑区域的计算支持成本，心理和学习能力的奖励最大化对于与他人的互动至关重要。值得注意的是，这些地区的功能作用始终在具有共同社会行为的精神分裂症和自闭症等临床疾病中实施。因此，了解社会等级结构与学习和决策的整合所涉及的大脑机制可以提供有关社会行为的经诊断的见解。通过考虑在神经和认知水平上的社会背景的临时要素，对奖励价值和学习的心理结构之间的相互作用进行了研究，并扩展了研究领域标准（RDOC）倡议的目标。该提案的目标1将调查如何将稳定和暂时性的社会信息整合到具有会员目标的决策中。在这里，参与者将决定在分销游戏中分享奖励。当功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和计算模型结合到中性表示形式是否可以区分稳定和瞬态域中的他人的社会状况和权力的信息时，将通过结合功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和计算建模来测试特定的假设。 AIM 2将把这些机制扩展到竞争激烈的社会学习环境。在fMRI期间，参与者将执行一项任务，允许从期权做出的决策中评估复杂的信念学习。假设将评估支持社会学习的大脑机制是否取决于竞争者的感知状态和权力。在AIM 1中完成实验的同一参与者中研究这些过程将进一步比较层次身份表示。特定的测试将评估人类是否会根据不同维度的上下文形成潜在表示：会员与竞争目标，稳定的层次结构位置以及瞬态层次结构位置。最后，AIM 3将调查这些神经表征如何与社会不平等的日常社会互动和个人经历有关。当与他人所感知的层次结构与自己的层次结构互动时，人类倾向于部署情感调节策略。然而，情绪调节能力的缺陷是一系列心理病理学的征兆。因此，在这里，我们将确定社会等级制度的神经表示与日常生活相关的情绪调节和能力，以使人们在社会等级制度中变化的人们的意图。大脑机制与实验室之外的现实决定的对应关系可以告知潜在的未来干预措施，以减轻社会决策缺陷的精神病理学缺陷。总体而言，该提案旨在结合候选人在功能性神经成像和经济决策方面的专业知识，以准备候选人的独立研究职业，专注于社会决策的神经力学。