Reinforcement Learning in Multidimensional Environments Relies on Attention Mechanisms
Name
Niv-2015-Reinforcement learning.pdf
Size
943.35 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1954510d1da293629994956ed7a19f93
Author(s)
Niv, Yael
Daniel, Reka
Geana, Andra
Gershman, Samuel J.
Leong, Yuan Chang
Radulescu, Angela
Wilson, Robert C.
Date Issued
May 2015
Journal
Journal of Neuroscience
Publisher
Society for Neuroscience
Citation
Niv, Y., R. Daniel, A. Geana, S. J. Gershman, Y. C. Leong, A. Radulescu, and R. C. Wilson. “Reinforcement Learning in Multidimensional Environments Relies on Attention Mechanisms.” Journal of Neuroscience 35, no. 21 (May 27, 2015): 8145–8157.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In recent years, ideas from the computational field of reinforcement learning have revolutionized the study of learning in the brain, famously providing new, precise theories of how dopamine affects learning in the basal ganglia. However, reinforcement learning algorithms are notorious for not scaling well to multidimensional environments, as is required for real-world learning. We hypothesized that the brain naturally reduces the dimensionality of real-world problems to only those dimensions that are relevant to predicting reward, and conducted an experiment to assess by what algorithms and with what neural mechanisms this “representation learning” process is realized in humans. Our results suggest that a bilateral attentional control network comprising the intraparietal sulcus, precuneus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in selecting what dimensions are relevant to the task at hand, effectively updating the task representation through trial and error. In this way, cortical attention mechanisms interact with learning in the basal ganglia to solve the “curse of dimensionality” in reinforcement learning.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.2978-14.2015
