Диссертации, представленные на защиту и подготовленные в НИУ ВШЭ

We study the functional and computational mechanisms of learning during competitive (bidding) decisions, of competitive decisions leading to exploitation behavior when facing scarce resources in social and non-social environments. We also conducted a meta-analysis to study to what extent learning in social contexts is a specialized function with an anatomical and/or computational specialization.We found that learning during bidding decisions involves the striatum (which represents value), frontopolar cortex (which determines context), and parietal cortex (which executes numerical computations). Computational modeling suggested that over-harvesting of common resources was facilitated by the modulatory effect of social comparison (presumably from prefrontal regions) on value signals, which furnishes an explanation of people’s tendency to over-exploit unregulated common natural resources. Finally, our meta-analysis showed that most behavioral adaptations to navigate social environments are reused from frontal and subcortical areas processing generic value representation and learning, but that a specialized circuitry might have evolved in the prefrontal cortex to deal with social context representation.