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| Poster #Cognition How do sound and light cues alter motivation for risky gambles? |
| Catharine A. Winstanley University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada |
It has long been known that audiovisual cues, when paired repeatedly with appetitive outcomes like sugary rewards or liquids, can come to act as reinforcers in their own right due to the attribution of incentive salience. Electronic gambling machines and gaming apps make heavy use of these cues to signal rewarding events during play. We have shown that, in both rats and humans, presenting sound and light cues concurrent with reward delivery can increase preference for “high-risk, high-reward” options in laboratory-based gambling tasks. However, computational modeling using reinforcement learning algorithms suggest that cue-induced risky choice is not driven by enhanced learning from rewards, as we would expect if the cues were acting as conditioned reinforcers, but instead through impaired learning from penalties. Furthermore, analyses of data from over 800 rats suggest that even though the risk-promoting effect of the cues looks superficially similar across sex, cue-induced risky choice may operate via different cognitive processes in females vs males. Data from behavioral pharmacology studies and chemogenetic manipulations suggest reward-concurrent cues alter the recruitment of multiple neurotransmitter systems and brain regions in the decision-making process. Although daunting in its complexity, these studies also suggest a variety of approaches that may neutralize the deleterious effect of such cues on cognition. |