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Contributed Talk Session: Thursday, August 14, 10:00 – 11:00 am, Room C1.04
Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

A single general strategy supports flexible behavior in response to both gradual and sudden changes

Jessica Passlack¹, Maria K Eckstein²; ¹University of Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, ²Google DeepMind

Presenter: Jessica Passlack

Most decisions we make occur in an ever-changing world, where flexibility is crucial for making intelligent decisions. However, despite a large array of different behavioral tasks being used to investigate flexible behavior, existing research has focused primarily on individual tasks in isolation, preventing understanding of whether there is a general strategy underlying flexible behavior. Here, we designed a set of tasks that spanned two hallmarks of behaviors that require flexible decision making: gradual and sudden changes. We found that behavioral correlates were similar across both types of changes and that a neural network could learn a general strategy to support behavior. Our results indicate that a neural network approach in combination with across-feature task design allows for determining whether a general underlying strategy supports different aspects of flexible behavior. This opens the door for interrogating the building blocks of the general strategy underlying flexible behavior.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF