Humans perseverate on punishment avoidance goals in multigoal reinforcement learning

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Behavioral Economics
• Clinical Psychology

Background:

• Effective adaptation requires managing multiple, often competing, goals.
• Understanding the cognitive mechanisms of goal management, particularly reward seeking and punishment avoidance, is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how humans balance reward seeking and punishment avoidance goals.
• To explore the relationship between goal management flexibility and anxiety, specifically chronic worry.

Main Methods:

• Development of a novel multigoal pursuit task with trial-specific reward or punishment goals.
• Utilizing a computational model to quantify goal disengagement and resource allocation.
• Assessing 192 participants, including those with chronic worry.

Main Results:

• Participants demonstrated less flexibility in avoiding punishment compared to pursuing rewards.
• Individuals often persisted in avoiding previously punished cues even when benign.
• No significant downregulation of avoidance was observed when punishment avoidance goals were less abundant.
• Preliminary evidence suggests individuals with chronic worry struggle to disengage from punishment avoidance when instructed to seek reward.

Conclusions:

• Human behavior is characterized by less flexible punishment avoidance than reward seeking.
• Difficulty disengaging from punishment avoidance may be a contributing factor to chronic worry.
• Further research in larger samples is warranted to confirm the link between punishment avoidance inflexibility and chronic worry.