Prior preferences beneficially influence social and non-social learning

Tor Tarantola (), Dharshan Kumaran, Peter Dayan and Benedetto De Martino ()
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Tor Tarantola: University of Cambridge
Dharshan Kumaran: University College London
Peter Dayan: University College London
Benedetto De Martino: University College London

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Our personal preferences affect a broad array of social behaviors. This includes the way we learn the preferences of others, an ability that often relies on limited or ambiguous information. Here we report an egocentric influence on this type of social learning that is reflected in both performance and response times. Using computational models that combine inter-trial learning and intra-trial choice, we find transient effects of participants’ preferences on the learning process, through the influence of priors, and persistent effects on the choice process. A second experiment shows that these effects generalize to non-social learning, though participants in the social learning experiment appeared to additionally benefit by using their knowledge about the popularity of certain preferences. We further find that the domain-general egocentric influences we identify can yield performance advantages in uncertain environments.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00826-8

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