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Pavlovian Conditioned Approach Training in Rats

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Reduced Pavlovian Value Updating Alters Decision-Making in Sign-Trackers.

Luigi A E Degni^1,2, Lorenzo Mattioni¹, Claudio Danti¹

¹Center for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Cesena 47521, Italy.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|December 22, 2025

Summary

Individuals prone to reward-predicting cues exhibit slower belief updating, leading to biased decisions in reward-guided behavior. This research explores the interplay between Pavlovian and instrumental learning systems and identifies learner types influencing decision-making flexibility.

Keywords:

computational modeling eye-tracking pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer reinforcement learning sign-trackers

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Behavioral Economics

Background:

Reward-guided behavior involves both learning actions for rewards (instrumental learning) and recognizing reward-predicting cues (Pavlovian conditioning).
The brain's arbitration between these learning systems, particularly when cues are irrelevant, is not fully understood.
Individual differences, such as sign-tracking versus goal-tracking tendencies, may influence how Pavlovian cues bias decisions.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how the brain updates and arbitrates between instrumental and Pavlovian learning systems.
To identify different learner types (sign-trackers vs. goal-trackers) and their strategies in decision-making.
To understand the computational mechanisms underlying inflexible decision-making influenced by Pavlovian cues.

Main Methods:

Employed a Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer task in 60 human participants.
Utilized eye-tracking and pupillometry to monitor attention and arousal.
Applied computational modeling to analyze decision-making strategies and learning rates.

Main Results:

Participants dynamically arbitrated between Pavlovian and instrumental value estimations.
Sign-trackers, who favor cue-outcome associations, showed lower performance when exposed to Pavlovian cues.
Lower performance in sign-trackers was attributed to slower updating of Pavlovian cue values, not overweighting them.

Conclusions:

Individual differences in belief updating rates contribute to inflexible decision-making.
A computational framework is proposed for understanding maladaptive cue reactivity.
Findings may inform interventions for disorders characterized by compulsive cue-seeking behaviors.