A Reinforcement Meta-Learning framework of executive function and information demand

A Distinct Neural Code Supports Prospection of Future Probabilities During Instrumental Information-Seeking

“…Our findings extend these reports by showing that the human parietal cortex and extrastriate areas multiplex information about probabilistic variables—of EPC, PC, and PG—that are distinct from variables representing information value. Thus, our results support the idea that information gathering has separate probabilistic and value-based components, as proposed based on both behavioral (Braunlich and Love 2022) and neural (Silvetti et al 2023) results. This result is consistent with studies showing that monkey parietal neurons carry dissociable signals of prior uncertainty and rewards (Horan, Daddaoua, and Gottlieb 2019; Li et al 2022).…”

“…C.-H. Yang, Wolpert, and Lengyel 2016)-or, alternatively, through explicit purchase decisions-for example, when a firm employs a consultant or a physician orders a medical test. Studies of information demand have primarily tested the latter scenario, using tasks in which participants are given a description of a situation and are asked to make a decision about whether or how much information to request in the situation (Furl and Averbeck 2011;Filimon et al 2020;Kaanders et al 2021;Gottlieb 2023). Neuroimaging investigations have focused on the value of information (VOI)the extent to which obtaining information increases the rewards expected from future actions and choices (Raiffa and Schlaifer 1961;Howard 1966)-and showed that VOI is encoded in value and executive areas including the striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex (Kobayashi and Hsu 2019;Kobayashi et al 2021).…”

Leveraging vision to understand curiosity

“…An alternative, not mutually exclusive, possibility is that the ACC is not primarily involved in generating curiosity based on certainty, but rather in recruiting cognitive functions to satisfy curiosity. This hypothesis is consistent with the role of ACC in executive function (Shenhav et al 2013) and its hypothesized role in conveying signals of confidence and certainty to the fronto-parietal network to implement attentional orienting for information gathering (Silvetti et al, 2023; Gottlieb et al 2021; Foley et al 2017; Horan et al 2020; White et al 2019). A final possibility is that the ACC plays distinct roles in instrumental decisions, when information is used to guide actions that lead to rewards, versus non-instrumental decisions like curiosity, which are intrinsically motivated and independent of external rewards (Gruber et al 2014; Gottlieb et al 2021).…”

Emerging Principles of Attention and Information Demand

“…The network also explains noninstrumental information demand on the basis of the fact that dopamine cells encode the intrinsic utility of noninstrumental information and can motivate information sampling even in the absence of instrumental incentives (Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009). Importantly, dopamine firing rates scale linearly with reward probability and can thus explain anticipatory utility (which increases if a reward is a priori more likely; Silvetti et al, 2023). This result is consistent with a recent proposal that anticipatory utility emerges primarily from subcortical dopaminergic structures, whereas uncertainty-based information demand relies on additional cortical areas such as the orbitofrontal cortex (Charpentier et al, 2018) and, as mentioned above, the ACC and parietal cortex.…”

“…In recent studies, we showed that neurons in the monkey lateral intraparietal area, which are involved in orienting attention and gaze, are sensitive to diagnosticity and prior uncertainty (Foley et al, 2017; Horan et al, 2019; Li et al, 2022; Taghizadeh et al, 2020) and proposed a neurocomputational model of EIG-based attention control (Silvetti et al, 2023).…”