The effect of self-focus on personal and social foraging behaviour

Abstract

The continuous balancing of the risks and benefits of exploiting known options or exploring new opportunities is essential to human life. We forage for new opportunities when they are deemed to be more attractive than the available option, but this decision to forage also entails costs. People differ in their propensity to exploit or forage, and both the social circumstances and our individual value orientations are likely influences. Here, participants made foraging decisions for themselves and for a charity of their choice in two paradigms: one that features two distinct modes of decision-making (foraging vs classical economic decision-making) and one which is more directly related to the classical animal foraging and ethology literature. Across both paradigms, individuals who possessed a stronger self-focused value orientation obtained more rewards when they were allowed to forage for themselves rather than the charity. Neuroimaging during the tasks revealed that this effect was associated with activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) in that more self-focused individuals showed lower activity in dACC for the self-condition relative to the other condition. This evidence reveals a dynamic interplay between foraging outcomes and the higher-order value system of individuals.

Disentangling choice value and choice conflict in sequential decisions under risk

“…Our results are silent on which of these variables better accounts for dACC activity during such a task, but our normative and empirical findings from Experiment 2 suggest a clear path towards resolving this question. Previous studies by Shenhav and colleagues applied this same approach to deconfound foraging value and choice conflict in a non-sequential foraging choice task (originating in [ 5 ]) and demonstrated that choice conflict consistently accounted for dACC activity during these choices better than foraging value [ 2 , 6 , 21 ]. While questions remain regarding whether foraging value signals might emerge by altering other properties of this experimental design (e.g., the reward-related cues), this approach was successful at unambiguously disentangling conflict and foraging value by enabling the authors to test for qualitatively distinct patterns of neural activity (i.e., ones that vary monotonically vs. non-monotonically).…”

Disentangling choice value and choice conflict in sequential decisions under risk

“…Our results are silent on which of these variables better accounts for dACC activity during such a task, but our normative and empirical findings from Experiment 2 suggest a clear path towards resolving this question. Previous studies by Shenhav and colleagues applied this same approach to deconfounding foraging value and choice conflict in a non-sequential foraging choice task (originating in Kolling et al (2016)) and demonstrated that choice conflict consistently accounted for dACC activity during these choices better than foraging value (Shenhav, Straccia, et al, 2016;Shenhav et al, 2014;Zacharopoulos, Shenhav, Constantino, Maio, & Linden, 2018). It is therefore possible that a neuroimaging study of a deconfounded version of the pig dice task (e.g., our Experiment 2) would similarly demonstrate that activity previously attributed to switch value (e.g., cumulative sum of rewards) is better accounted for by choice conflict, but this awaits empirical testing.…”

Foraging optimally in social neuroscience: computations and methodological considerations

“…In another study in humans, Zacharopoulos et al. (2018 ) required participants to make patch-leaving decisions, either to collect rewards for themselves or to collect rewards for a charity of their choice.…”