The Role of Reward on Future Decision Making

Abstract

Rewards play a critical role in the acquisition (learning) and transfer of knowledge (generalisation) (Skinner, 1953; Tiihonen et al., 1997; Grillon, 2002). This process is hindered by a phenomenon known as "misallocation," in which rewards are incorrectly attributed to behaviours that did not cause them to occur (Davison & Jenkins, 1985; Davison & Nevin, 1999; Cowie et al., 2016; Cowie et al., 2021). Prior research gives reason to expect that misallocation may occur to greater degrees for individuals with existing reward processing deficits, such as populations with a social anxiety disorder (SAD). The current study investigated evidence for misallocation of rewards in individuals with SAD. 81 human participants were presented with social and non-social stimuli composed of happy or sad emotions and small or big circles, forming four separate associations. Individuals were taught to either gain a reward or avoid punishment. Once responding had stabilised, participants were presented with varying circle sizes and emotional intensities to assess the degree to which subjects generalised the learnt contingencies to novel stimuli. For all participants, social stimuli facilitated learning to a greater extent compared to non-social stimuli, suggesting more misallocation of rewards during non-social trials. This may imply that socially relevant information is processed in a higher order than non-social. Individuals diagnosed with SAD achieved greater correct response accuracy during reward-seeking trials (Happy or Big stimulus types) than escape trials (Small and Sad stimulus types), while undiagnosed individuals achieved greater correct response accuracy during escape trials (Small and Sad stimulus types), than reward-seeking trials (Happy or Big stimulus types). This suggests that diagnosed individuals may be more driven by attaining reward, while others are driven to escape punishment. Generalisation gradients were similar across anxiety levels and diagnosis, except that the slope was steeper for social relative to non-social stimuli for participants with some level anxiety. No such difference was observed in participants without anxiety. Taken together, these findings suggest that stimulus type may contribute to the processing deficits in SAD, and that individuals with a clinical diagnosis of SAD may be more responsive to rewards as opposed to avoiding punishment. This should be taken into consideration in the development of treatment practices.