Reward Reinforcement Creates Enduring Facilitation of Goal-directed Behavior

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Behavioral Psychology

Background:

• Habits automate rewarding actions but reduce behavioral flexibility.
• Goal-directed systems provide flexibility for context-appropriate behaviors.
• Recent findings challenge the strict dichotomy between habit and goal-directed systems, showing reward influences both action and goal selection.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if reward reinforcement can induce habitual goal selection.
• To determine if reward reinforcement impacts cognitive flexibility in goal pursuit.

Main Methods:

• A rewarded, context-based perceptual discrimination task was employed.
• Drift-diffusion models and psychometric analyses were used to assess performance.
• Behavioral biases were examined during a reward-free test phase.

Main Results:

• Reward reinforcement facilitated the initiation and execution of specific rules.
• These reward-induced biases persisted even after rewards were removed.
• No evidence was found that reward reinforcement decreased cognitive flexibility for alternative rules.

Conclusions:

• Reward learning significantly influences the selection and implementation of goals.
• Reward reinforcement creates lasting effects on goal pursuit without necessarily causing inflexibility.
• The reward learning system plays a crucial role in modulating goal-directed behavior.