NEUROSCIENCE

Goods & Actions, Model-based and Model-free

ABSTRACT

Two parallel lines of research have begun to identify the neural correlations and mechanisms underlying decision-making and learning. One line has focused on the distinction between the value of goods (i.e. an apple), and the value of actions (i.e. reaching out toward an apple), while the other has identified learning systems that use the structure of the task (model-based) and those that simply learn the values of actions without knowledge of task structure (model-free). This project aims to identify whether and to what extent these two sets of systems overlap, and how to dissociate them cleanly from one another by changing how the task works, and thereby bias behavior toward or away from a given system.