Deliberation during online bargaining reveals strategic information A standard assumption in game theory is that decision-makers have preplanned strategies telling them what actions to take for every contingency. In contrast, nonstrategic decisions often involve an on-the-spot comparison process, with longer response times (RT) for choices between more similarly appealing options. If strategic decisions also exhibit these patterns, then RT might betray private information and alter game theory predictions. Here, we examined bargaining behavior to determine whether RT reveals private information in strategic settings. Using preexisting and experimental data from eBay, we show that both buyers and sellers take hours longer to accept bad offers and to reject good offers. We find nearly identical patterns in the two datasets, indicating a causal effect of offer size on RT. However, this relationship is half as strong for rejections as for acceptances, reducing the amount of useful private information revealed by the sellers. Counter to our predictions, buyers are discouraged by slow rejections—they are less likely to counteroffer to slow sellers. We also show that a drift-diffusion model (DDM), traditionally limited to decisions on the order of seconds, can account for decisions on the order of hours, sometimes days. The DDM reveals that more experienced sellers are less cautious and more inclined to accept offers. In summary, strategic decisions are inconsistent with preplanned strategies. This underscores the need for game theory to incorporate RT as a strategic variable and broadens the applicability of the DDM to slow decisions.
On the varieties of conscious experiences: Altered Beliefs Under Psychedelics (ALBUS) How is it that psychedelics so profoundly impact brain and mind? According to the model of “Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics” (REBUS), 5-HT2a agonism is thought to help relax prior expectations, thus making room for new perspectives and patterns. Here, we introduce an alternative (but largely compatible) perspective, proposing that REBUS effects may primarily correspond to a particular (but potentially pivotal) regime of very high levels of 5-HT2a receptor agonism. Depending on both a variety of contextual factors and the specific neural systems being considered, we suggest opposite effects may also occur in which synchronous neural activity becomes more powerful, with accompanying “Strengthened Beliefs Under Psychedelics” (SEBUS) effects. Such SEBUS effects are consistent with the enhanced meaning-making observed in psychedelic therapy (e.g. psychological insight and the noetic quality of mystical experiences), with the imposition of prior expectations on perception (e.g. hallucinations and pareidolia), and with the delusional thinking that sometimes occurs during psychedelic experiences (e.g. apophenia, paranoia, engendering of inaccurate interpretations of events, and potentially false memories). With “Altered Beliefs Under Psychedelics” (ALBUS), we propose that the manifestation of SEBUS vs. REBUS effects may vary across the dose–response curve of 5-HT2a signaling. While we explore a diverse range of sometimes complex models, our basic idea is fundamentally simple: psychedelic experiences can be understood as kinds of waking dream states of varying degrees of lucidity, with similar underlying mechanisms. We further demonstrate the utility of ALBUS by providing neurophenomenological models of psychedelics focusing on mechanisms of conscious perceptual synthesis, dreaming, and episodic memory and mental simulation.
Abstractness impacts conversational dynamics Conversation topics may vary in abstractness. This might impact the effort required by speakers to reach a common ground and, ultimately, an interactive alignment. In fact, people typically feel less confident with abstract concepts and single-words rating studies suggest abstract concepts are more associated with social interactions than concrete concepts—hence suggesting increasing levels of abstractness enhance inner and mutual monitoring processes. However, experimental studies addressing conversational dynamics afforded by abstract concepts are still sparse. In three preregistered experiments we ask whether abstract sentences are associated with specific constructs in dialogue, i.e., higher uncertainty, more curiosity and willingness to continue a conversation, and more questions related to causal and agency aspects. We do so by asking participants to evaluate the plausibility of linguistic exchanges referring to concrete and abstract concepts. Results support theories proposing that abstract concepts involve more inner monitoring and social dynamics compared to concrete concepts and suggest that reaching alignment in dialogue is more effortful with abstract than with concrete concepts.
Distinct input-specific mechanisms enable presynaptic homeostatic plasticity Animals face uncertainty about their environments due to initial ignorance or subsequent changes. They therefore need to explore. However, the algorithmic structure of exploratory choices in the brain still remains largely elusive. Artificial agents face the same problem, and a venerable idea in reinforcement learning is that they can plan appropriate exploratory choices offline, during the equivalent of quiet wakefulness or sleep. Although offline processing in humans and other animals, in the form of hippocampal replay and preplay, has recently been the subject of highly informative modelling, existing methods only apply to known environments. Thus, they cannot predict exploratory replay choices during learning and/or behaviour in the face of uncertainty. Here, we extend an influential theory of hippocampal replay and examine its potential role in approximately optimal exploration, deriving testable predictions for the patterns of exploratory replay choices in a paradigmatic spatial navigation task. Our modelling provides a normative interpretation of the available experimental data suggestive of exploratory replay. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of sequence replay, and license a range of new experimental paradigms that should further our understanding of offline processing.
Exploring replay Animals face uncertainty about their environments due to initial ignorance or subsequent changes. They therefore need to explore. However, the algorithmic structure of exploratory choices in the brain still remains largely elusive. Artificial agents face the same problem, and a venerable idea in reinforcement learning is that they can plan appropriate exploratory choices offline, during the equivalent of quiet wakefulness or sleep. Although offline processing in humans and other animals, in the form of hippocampal replay and preplay, has recently been the subject of highly informative modelling, existing methods only apply to known environments. Thus, they cannot predict exploratory replay choices during learning and/or behaviour in the face of uncertainty. Here, we extend an influential theory of hippocampal replay and examine its potential role in approximately optimal exploration, deriving testable predictions for the patterns of exploratory replay choices in a paradigmatic spatial navigation task. Our modelling provides a normative interpretation of the available experimental data suggestive of exploratory replay. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of sequence replay, and license a range of new experimental paradigms that should further our understanding of offline processing.
Long-term Contingency Learning Depends on Contingency Awareness We examined long-term contingency learning (CL) in a color classification task with two separate sets of non-overlapping color-word contingencies that were employed in alternating blocks of the task (“alternating blocks paradigm”). Analyzing only the first occurrences of the word distractors in each block provides a pure indicator of long-term CL that is free from recency-based episodic retrieval processes. A high-powered (n = 110), pre-registered study revealed evidence for reliable long-term color-word CL. This long-term CL effect depended on contingency awareness, indicating that genuine long-term CL is influenced by propositional knowledge.
A common stay-on-goal mechanism in anterior cingulate cortex for information and effort choices Humans and non-humans alike often make choices to gain information, even when the information cannot be used to change the outcome. Prior research has shown the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is important for evaluating options involving reward-predictive information. Here we studied the role of ACC in information choices using optical inhibition to evaluate the contribution of this region during specific epochs of decision making. Rats could choose between an uninformative option followed by a cue that predicted reward 50% of the time vs. a fully informative option that signaled outcomes with certainty, but was rewarded only 20% of the time. Reward seeking during the informative S+ cue decreased following ACC inhibition, indicating a causal contribution of this region in supporting reward expectation to a cue signaling reward with certainty. Separately in a positive control experiment and in support of a known role for this region in sustaining high-effort behavior for preferred rewards, we observed reduced lever presses and lower breakpoints in effort choices following ACC inhibition. The lack of changes in reward latencies in both types of decisions indicate the motivational value of rewards remained intact, revealing instead a common role for ACC in maintaining persistence toward certain and valuable rewards.
PEL 360: Karl Marx on Economic Value (Part One) Part 2 On Capital (1867), Ch. 1, “The Commodity.” This continues our discussion in our last episode introducing Marx’s economic project. So how does one begin to explain a holistic system? Marx chooses to start with wealth, i.e. the thing Adam Smith was trying to explain in The Wealth of Nations, and wealth, for Marx, is represented in the commodity: stuff that we buy and sell.
So what makes a commodity valuable? Clearly, we each have different needs, and so a particular commodity will have different values for each of us (a different “use value”), but in the aggregate, the overall need for something as expressed in the willingness of someone to pay a certain amount for it determines its exchange value, and in this way, even though the uses of, e.g. a bunch of grapes and an iphone are different, we can measure the exchange value of one (at a given time in a given market) in terms of the other, and ultimately, we use a third thing, money, as the medium for making it obvious that any commodity can (in the right quantity) be in effect traded for any other.
So does this mean that value as abstracted over different consumers is just entirely a matter of demand, that commodities have no economic value in themselves? No, this is the error that Marx things political economists have fallen into. Marx thinks we need to look beneath the commodity into its production and locates its value in the labor that went into it. This is the “labor theory of value”: Even though many things can be useful without any labor (you go out in your yard and the trees are just teeming with fruit waiting to be plucked), if something is a commodity, the difficulty of getting that fruit (or whatever) to market, and so the underlying value of that commodity, is a matter of how much effort it takes.