Impairment in predicting reward value when contingencies change after severe traumatic brain injury
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1
University of New South Wales, Australia
Aims: Socially inappropriate behaviour after severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been associated with impairments in reversal learning, suggesting that it may result from an inability to update behaviour when social reinforcement contingencies change. One reason that people with TBI may be unable to update responding is that they are unable to update information about the value of an expected reward. This study aimed to determine whether participants with TBI could update information about the value of a predicted reward when reinforcement contingencies change.
Method: Eighteen participants with TBI (14 males, mean age 42.7) and 18 control participants (13 males, mean age 43.1) completed a simple reinforcement learning task in which they learned which stimulus predicted high reward (50 points) and which predicted low reward (1 point). The reinforcement contingencies were reversed half way through the task. Reward positivity was measured as the mean amplitude 300-400ms after the predictive stimulus was displayed.
Results: In both the TBI and control group, 12 of the 18 participants demonstrated an electrophysiological differentiation of the high and low reward prediction cues in the learning phase before contingencies were reversed. A repeated measures ANOVA with control participants who did differentiate high from low reward cues in the learning phase revealed a significant main effect of reward, F(1,11)=19.05, p=.001, η2=.63, but no main effect of phase, and no significant interaction. A repeated measures ANOVA with the TBI group who differentiated high from low reward in the learning phase revealed a trend toward a significant interaction, F(1,11)=4.58, p=.056, η2=.29.
Conclusions: The control participants who demonstrated an electrophysiological differentiation between the high and low reward cues, but not those with TBI, were able to update these contingencies when they were reversed. This inability to update information about the value of an expected reward may contribute to inappropriate social responding.
Keywords:
TBI,
reinforcement learning,
reward prediction,
Reward positivity,
Socia,
inappropriate social behaviour
Conference:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
Osborne-Crowley
K,
McDonald
S,
Rushby
JA and
Le Pelley
M
(2015). Impairment in predicting reward value when contingencies change after severe traumatic brain injury.
Conference Abstract:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00021
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Received:
08 Oct 2015;
Published Online:
30 Nov 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Katherine Osborne-Crowley, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, 2052, Australia, k.osbornecrowley@unsw.edu.au