Developmental shifts in computations used to detect environmental controllability

Abstract

Accurate assessment of the controllability of the environment enables individuals to adaptively adjust their behavior—exploiting rewards when desirable outcomes are contingent upon their actions and minimizing costly deliberation about how to behave when their actions are inconsequential. However, it remains unclear how inferences of environmental controllability change from childhood to adulthood. Using a task that covertly alternated between a controllable and uncontrollable condition, we found that accurate controllability assessments improved with age and that participants of all ages exhibited a bias toward beliefs of controllability. Computational modeling revealed a qualitative shift across development in the learning processes underlying task performance, with the use of task structure knowledge to guide informative interventions that revealed the degree of environmental controllability emerging as the predominant strategy during adolescence. Age-related improvements in the detection of environmental controllability may foster increasingly adaptive behavior into adulthood by revealing when actions can be leveraged for one’s benefit.

Social threat avoidance depends on action-outcome predictability

“…Nonetheless, an above-chance avoidance rate was also observed in the unpredictable condition in all three experiments. This may suggest that participants adopted a SR behavioral controller to guide avoidance when the environment did not allow to predict the action-outcome, consistently with findings from previous studies (Dorfman & Gershman, 2019;Gershman et al, 2021;Raab et al, 2023;Raab & Hartley, 2020). An alternative explanation is that some participants did not form an accurate representation of environmental contingencies, for instance failing to learn that the action-outcome association was stochastic in the unpredictable condition, or believing that it was less than deterministic, yet not entirely stochastic.…”

“…Recent evidence suggests that rapid and implicit goal-directed (GD) processes play a dominant role in threat avoidance decisions, as compared to stimulus-response (SR) associations (Cain, 2019;LeDoux & Daw, 2018;Moors, 2017). GD and SR processes have been proposed to be arbitrated by action-outcome controllability, with GD mechanisms dominating in controllable environments and SR in uncontrollable environments (Dorfman & Gershman, 2019;Raab et al, 2023). To assess the contribution of SR and GD processes in social threat avoidance, we manipulated outcome's controllability during approachavoidance decision when facing social threat, by making the action-outcome association predictable or unpredictable.…”

“…Conversely, in uncontrollable contexts, when actions and consequences are not statistically related, the additional computational complexity of GD processes is unnecessary, and SR associations are a more parsimonious policy (Dorfman & Gershman, 2019). Consistent with this account, SR behavior has been shown to be attenuated in controllable environments and enhanced in uncontrollable environments (Dorfman & Gershman, 2019;Gershman et al, 2021;Raab et al, 2023;Raab & Hartley, 2020).…”

Learning how to learn from social feedback: The origins of early vocal development

“…Animals form expectations about future events based on prior contingencies. Recent computational work has provided evidence that school‐aged children can track their expectations about the controllability of environments (Raab et al., 2022). That is, the extent to which one's own actions predict state changes in the environment above and beyond previous states reflects the controllability of an environment.…”