Neurocomputational mechanism of controllability inference under a multi-agent setting
Abstract
Controllability perception significantly influences motivated behavior and emotion and requires an estimation of one's influence on an environment. Previous studies have shown that an agent can infer controllability by observing contingency between one's own action and outcome if there are no other outcome-relevant agents in an environment. However, if there are multiple agents who can influence the outcome, estimation of one's genuine controllability requires exclusion of other agents' possible influence. Here, we first investigated a computational and neural mechanism of controllability inference in a multi-agent setting. Our novel multi-agent Bayesian controllability inference model showed that other people's action-outcome contingency information is integrated with one's own action-outcome contingency to infer controllability, which can be explained as a Bayesian inference. Model-based functional MRI analyses showed that multi-agent Bayesian controllability inference recruits the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and striatum. Then, this inferred controllability information was leveraged to increase motivated behavior in the vmPFC. These results generalize the previously known role of the striatum and vmPFC in single-agent controllability to multi-agent controllability, and this generalized role requires the TPJ in addition to the striatum of single-agent controllability to integrate both self- and other-related information. Finally, we identified an innate positive bias toward the self during the multi-agent controllability inference, which facilitated behavioral adaptation under volatile controllability. Furthermore, low positive bias and high negative bias were associated with increased daily feelings of guilt. Our results provide a mechanism of how our sense of controllability fluctuates due to other people in our lives, which might be related to social learned helplessness and depression.
Additional Information
© 2021 Kim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received: January 22, 2021; Accepted: October 10, 2021; Published: November 9, 2021. This research was supported by the Brain Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF, https://www.nrf.re.kr) funded by the Ministry of Science & ICT (NRF - 2016M3C7A1914448 to B.J. and NRF - 2017M3C7A1031331 to B.J.). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The language of this manuscript was edited by American Journal Experts (AJE). The authors acknowledge R.R. for helpful discussions on developing the paradigm. Data Availability: All data including task behavior, codes used to generate figures, computational models and fMRI data will be available at https://github.com/kjj11033/relative_controllability. Author Contributions: Conceptualization: Jaejoong Kim, Seokho Yoon, Haeorm Park, Bumseok Jeong. Data curation: Jaejoong Kim, Seokho Yoon, Haeorm Park, Bumseok Jeong. Formal analysis: Jaejoong Kim, Sang Wan Lee, Bumseok Jeong. Funding acquisition: Bumseok Jeong. Investigation: Jaejoong Kim. Methodology: Jaejoong Kim. Project administration: Bumseok Jeong. Resources: Bumseok Jeong. Supervision: Sang Wan Lee, Bumseok Jeong. Visualization: Jaejoong Kim. Writing – original draft: Jaejoong Kim. Writing – review & editing: Jaejoong Kim, Sang Wan Lee, Bumseok Jeong. The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Attached Files
Published - journal.pcbi.1009549.pdf
Supplemental Material - journal.pcbi.1009549.s001.tif
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Supplemental Material - journal.pcbi.1009549.s011.docx
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC8604335
- Eprint ID
- 112302
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20211208-951035000
- 2016M3C7A1914448
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- 2017M3C7A1031331
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- Created
-
2021-12-10Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-12-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field