Journal
SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 10, Issue 5, Pages 735-743Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsu130
Keywords
learning theory; social neuroscience; reward; cue competition; medial prefrontal cortex
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Funding
- Swiss National Science Foundation [PP00P1_128574]
- Neuroscience Center Zurich (ZNZ)
- Zurich Center for Integrative Human Physiology (ZIHP)
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) [PP00P1_128574] Funding Source: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
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When we are learning to associate novel cues with outcomes, learning is more efficient if we take advantage of previously learned associations and thereby avoid redundant learning. The blocking effect represents this sort of efficiency mechanism and refers to the phenomenon in which a novel stimulus is blocked from learning when it is associated with a fully predicted outcome. Although there is sufficient evidence that this effect manifests itself when individuals learn about their own rewards, it remains unclear whether it also does when they learn about others' rewards. We employed behavioral and neuroimaging methods to address this question. We demonstrate that blocking does indeed occur in the social domain and it does so to a similar degree as observed in the individual domain. On the neural level, activations in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) show a specific contribution to blocking and learning-related prediction errors in the social domain. These findings suggest that the efficiency principle that applies to reward learning in the individual domain also applies to that in the social domain, with the mPFC playing a central role in implementing it.
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