How Does Drug Use Shift the Balance Between Model-Based and Model-Free Control of Decision Making?

What influences the decisions we make? Do we construct rich maps of possible actions and their outcomes to select the best future option, using so-called model-based strategies, or do we default to something more automatic that reflects what generally has been best based on past experience, processes that are referred to as model-free strategies? These questions have motivated experiments designed to tease apart differences in these two decision-making strategies. In humans, a major advance toward addressing this question came from the development of a two-stage decision-making task that allows simultaneous determination of the relative weighting of the model-based and model-free strategies in use (1).

Source: Biological Psychiatry - May 20, 2019 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Kurt M. Fraser, Patricia H. Janak Tags: Commentary Source Type: research