How does the brain decide which mental strategy to use when inferring others' beliefs?
Excited to (finally!) see my first first-author paper out @natneuro.nature.com
Summary below 🧵 #CogSci #CogNeuro
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New preprint (by Vandendriessche et al.)
In everyday life, choices often lead to multiple simultaneous outcomes — some positive, some negative. Yet most reinforcement learning research has focused on situations where each choice produces only a single outcome 1/5
osf.io/preprints/ps...
One possible explanation for this association comes from the “Communication” subscale of the autistic traits questionnaire. Lower endorsement of items such as “I find it easy to read between the lines when someone is talking to me” was linked to lower outcome-irrelevant learning.
A more literal cognitive style may reflect a reduced tendency to search for hidden structure where none exists, leading to a more optimal behavior in these contexts.
At the same time, we replicated a previous finding that higher compulsivity is associated with higher outcome-irrelevant learning. This is especially interesting because autistic traits and compulsivity are positively correlated, yet show opposite associations with outcome-irrelevant learning.