Active Bayesian Inference in Choice Behaviour

Date

Mar 9, 2017

Time

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Speaker

Philipp Schwartenbeck, BSc MRes

Affiliation

Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience (University Salzburg) and Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (UCL)

Series

TUD NIC Kolloquium

Language

en

Main Topic

Psychologie

Other Topics

Psychologie

Description

Adaptive behaviour requires agents to build mental representations of their environment and infer adequate choice behaviour based on these representations. Recently, a computational model of planning and decision-making has been proposed that casts these processes as active Bayesian inference, assuming that the brain develops a generative (probabilistic) model of the environment to infer the latent structure of the world as well as actions that minimise surprise. I will present experimental work within that framework investigating some key predictions of active inference in choice behaviour. Particularly, I will present a study on the hypothesis that expected precision, which reflects an agent’s (Bayes optimal) confidence in action selection, is encoded by dopaminergic activity. We tested this in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment using a ‘limited offer’ paradigm, where subjects had to make a time-sensitive decision about when to accept a monetary offer. This task and theoretical framework motivates ongoing experimental work on decision-making in addiction in the context of ‘computational psychiatry’. Second, I will present a study testing a key behavioural prediction of surprise minimisation, namely that in addition to maximising value agents try to maximise the entropy over states and thus ‘keep their options open’. Together, these lines of work provide the basis for ongoing projects on the value of information and curiosity as well as the role of Bayesian model averaging in brain function, and raises interesting questions about how we build and generalise probabilistic models of the environment and how these processes might be relevant for understanding pathologic behaviour.

Links

• Livestream

Last modified: Apr 28, 2017, 6:16:07 PM