Spontaneous eye blink rate predicts individual differences in exploration and exploitation during reinforcement learning

Eye-blink rate predicts individual differences in pseudoneglect.

Most healthy individuals display a subtle spatial attentional bias, exhibiting relative inattention for stimuli on one side of the visual field, a phenomenon known as pseudoneglect. Prior work in animals and patients has implicated dopamine in spatial attention asymmetries. The current study therefore examined - in healthy individuals - the relationship between the attentional bias and spontane...

Individual differences in eye blink rate predict both transient and tonic pupil responses during reversal learning

The pupil response under constant illumination can be used as a marker of cognitive processes. In the past, pupillary responses have been studied in the context of arousal and decision-making. However, recent work involving Parkinson's patients suggested that pupillary responses are additionally affected by reward sensitivity. Here, we build on these findings by examining how pupil responses ar...

Exploration and Exploitation in Reinforcement Learning

Spontaneous eye blink rate predicts learning from negative, but not positive, outcomes.

A large body of research shows that striatal dopamine critically affects the extent to which we learn from the positive and negative outcomes of our decisions. In this study, we examined the relationship between reinforcement learning and spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR), a cheap, non-invasive, and easy to obtain marker of striatal dopaminergic activity. Based on previous findings from pharmac...

Dopamine signaling predicts individual differences in reinforcement learning in humans

The tradeoff between short-term and long-term consequences is inherent in many important decisions, as retirement savings or health behavior. Different neural accounts have been proposed to underlie intertemporal choice behavior via differences in valuation or selfcontrol mechanisms. Recent studies showed that imagining specific future events reduced reward delay discounting and was associated ...