The Effects of Sensory Reward Cues on Reinforcement Learning

Molly Summers* and Mariya Cherkasova

Life Science Building, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Presentation Category: Behavioral & Social Sciences (Poster Presentation #71)

Student’s Major: Neuroscience

Reward cues, such as the bells and whistles in slot machines, can have important motivational effects. For example, such reward cues can encourage risky behavior (Cherkasova et al, 2018). However, it is currently unknown whether such cues also influence learning from experience about which actions yield rewards or reinforcement learning. Compulsive gambling despite repeated losses may exemplify failure in reinforcement learning, and previous work suggests that gamblers indeed learn about reward probabilities more slowly, i.e. have a slower learning rate (M.S.M Lim et al. 2015). This means that their present decisions aren’t being properly guided by the outcomes of their past decisions. With our study, we examine if casino-inspired audiovisual reward cues will affect learning rates and other reinforcement learning parameters. Participants will need to make choices between two options that can earn them points. Participants will not know which option to choose on each trial and will have to guess this based on the outcomes of their previous choices. We are looking to see how fast the participants will learn reinforcement probabilities when the rewards are accompanied versus unaccompanied by the cues. We hypothesize that the presence of the audiovisual reward cues will lead the participants to believe that they are winning more often than they actually are and this will slow down their learning rate.

Funding:

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: WVU's Research Apprenticeship Program (RAP) & accompanying HONR 297-level course