Stefano Palminteri, Human Reinforcement Learning team Institut,
National de la Recherche Médical & Ecole Normale Supérieure, visits to give a talk as part of the SWE Colloquium on Thursday 17 May.

State-dependent evaluation and confirmatory biases in reward and punishment learning

Valence is a fundamental concept in the learning, decision-making and emotion literature.  However, in the reinforcement learning context, different facets of this psychological concept are often confounded and/or ill-defined. In the present talk we theoretically propose, mathematically formalize and experimentally investigate two different facets of valence: ‘contextual’ and ‘informational’. Combining imaging and modeling techniques in a series of studies, we found that these different aspects have dissociable computational and neural correlates, and exert powerful effects on human learning behavior.