Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2021 Feb 1;33(2):398–446. doi: 10.1162/neco_a_01341

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.

PMC Copyright notice

Figure 9: — A comparison of belief updating (four top rows) and behavior (bottom row) over 64 trials in our affective agent (plotted in orange) and an agent without higher-level contextual and affective states (plotted in gray). Context was changed midway through (vertical green line): food was on the left for the first 32 trials and on the right for the subsequent 32 trials. (First panel) The top panel shows differences in temporal dynamics of food location expectations. Thanks to her higher-level context states (which decayed over time due to uncertainty about cross-trial state transitions as defined in Figure 8), our affective agent (orange) weighed recent evidence more heavily, allowing her to shift context beliefs. In contrast, the agent without the higher affective level (gray) counted events only over time. While her expectations developed similarly to the affective agent for the first 32 trials, she was much slower in adjusting to the change in context (her beliefs return to 50/50 only after observing 32 trials for both left and right). (Second panel) This panel displays the strongest prior belief about policies for each agent (pretrial), tracking the product of the expected precision and the maximum of model evidence (negative $G_{π}$ ). The affective agent varied (pretrial) her expected precision dynamically with context reliability. The nonaffective agent instead obtained (initial) certainty about the best course of action much more slowly, only as a function of her action model (as initial expected precision was constant). (Third and fourth panels) A comparison of within-trial AC responses (fluctuations in expected precision) between the affective agent (third panel, orange) and the nonaffective agent (fourth panel, gray). Our affective agent exhibited large fluctuations in expected precision within trials only when she was switching between affective states: she attenuated AC responses by integrating them across trials, adjusting expected precision preemptively. In contrast, the nonaffective agent exhibited large fluctuations throughout the series of trials, being surprised repeatedly because she was unable to integrate affective charge. (Fifth panel) The bottom panel shows the behavioral outcomes for both agents. Before context reversal, their behaviors were indistinguishable. After context reversal, the nonaffective agent only foraged for information and exhibited avoidance behaviors, either staying down (policy 10) or moving back to the center (policy 7).