The role of prediction and outcomes in adaptive cognitive control

Publication date: Available online 16 February 2015 Source:Journal of Physiology-Paris Author(s): Anne-Marike Schiffer , Florian Waszak , Nick Yeung Humans adaptively perform actions to achieve their goals. This flexible behaviour requires two core abilities: the ability to anticipate the outcomes of candidate actions and the ability to select and imple ment actions in a goal-directed manner. The ability to predict outcomes has been extensively researched in reinforcement learning paradigms, but this work has often focused on simple actions that are not embedded in hierarchical and sequential structures that are characteristic of goal-directed human behaviour. On the other hand, the ability to select actions in accordance with high-level task goals, particularly in the presence of alternative responses and salient distractors, has been widely researched in cognitive control paradigms. Cognitive control research, however, has often paid less attention to the role of action outcomes. The present review attempts to bridge these accounts by proposing an outcome-guided mechanism for selection of extended actions. Our proposal builds on constructs from the hierarchical reinforcement learning literature, which emphasises the concept of reaching and evaluating informative states, i.e., states that constitute subgoals in complex actions. We develop an account of the neural mechanisms that allow outcome-guided action selection to be achieved in a network that relies on projectio...
Source: Journal of Physiology Paris - Category: Physiology Source Type: research