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Alec Solway

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YNICL Journal 2022 Journal Article

The relationships between subclinical OCD symptoms, beta/gamma-band power, and the rate of evidence integration during perceptual decision making

  • Alec Solway
  • Isabella Schneider
  • Yuqing Lei

Previous studies have demonstrated that the rate of evidence integration during perceptual decision making, a specific computationally defined parameter, is negatively correlated with both subclinical symptoms of OCD measured on a continuum and categorically diagnosed patient status. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this deficit are unknown. Separate work has shown that both gamma and beta-band power are related to evidence integration, and differences in beta-band power in particular have been hypothesized to hinder flexible behavioral control. We sought to unify these two disparate literatures, one on OCD-related information processing differences constrained by behavioral data alone, and the other on the neural correlates of evidence integration. Using computational modeling and scalp EEG, we tested (N = 67) the relationships between subclinical symptom scores, drift rate, and gamma/beta-band activity during perceptual decision making. We replicated both prior work showing deficits in evidence integration as a function of OCD symptoms, and work showing a relationship between evidence integration and gamma and beta-band power. As predicted, the slope of beta-band power was correlated with OCD symptoms. However, the relationships between OCD symptoms and drift rate and the slopes of gamma and beta-band power and drift rate remained unchanged when simultaneously accounting for all variables, speaking against the hypothesis that differences in band-band power explain drift rate deficits.

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RLDM Conference 2013 Conference Abstract

Optimal Task Decomposition

  • Alec Solway
  • Natalia Cordova
  • Debbie Yee
  • Andrew Barto
  • Yael Niv
  • Matthew Botvinick

Reinforcement learning has provided a rich framework for understanding the computational sub- strates underlying human decision making. Most work has so far has focused on simple decision problems with small state spaces. More recently researchers have begun applying ideas from hierarchical reinforce- ment learning, and the options framework in particular, to address how human decision making may scale. This framework specifies how the computational complexity associated with both learning and planning in high-dimensional state spaces may be reduced through the use of temporal abstraction. In addition to primitive actions that lead to transitions between adjacent states, the agent can execute options that lead to transitions between distant states. While there is now evidence that humans make use of options, it is unclear how they come to select which options are useful in the first place. We present option selection as a Bayesian model comparison problem and show that the options people select are those corresponding to the maximal model evidence.

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