Key result
Presenting discriminative stimuli during cardiac systole resulted in a higher learning rate for positive compared to negative prediction errors, demonstrating that the cardiac cycle affects asymmetric value updating.
Why the study?
This study aimed to investigate whether instrumental reward learning is affected by the cardiac cycle.
Does the timing of stimuli presentation during cardiac systole compared to diastole affect asymmetric value updating in instrumental reward learning in healthy adults?
Does the timing of stimuli presentation during cardiac systole compared to diastole affect asymmetric value updating in instrumental reward learning in healthy adults?
Natural fluctuations in cardiac afferent signals across the cardiac cycle affect asymmetric value updating in instrumental reward learning, with enhanced optimistic learning during systole.
May bias optimistic learning during systole in healthy adults; leaves open clinical relevance and need for replication.
This study aimed to investigate whether instrumental reward learning is affected by the cardiac cycle. To this end, we examined the effects of the cardiac cycle (systole or diastole) on the computational processes underlying the participants' choices in the instrumental learning task. In the instrumental learning task, participants were required to select one of two discriminative stimuli (neutral visual stimuli) and immediately receive reward/punishment feedback depending on the probability assigned to the chosen stimuli. To manipulate the cardiac cycle, the presentation of discriminative stimuli was timed to coincide with either cardiac systole or diastole. We fitted the participants' choices in the task with reinforcement learning (RL) models and estimated parameters involving instrumental learning (i.e., learning rate and inverse temperature) separately in the systole and diastole trials. Model-based analysis revealed that the learning rate for positive prediction errors was higher than that for negative prediction errors in the systole trials; however, learning rates did not differ between positive and negative prediction errors in the diastole trials. These results demonstrate that the natural fluctuation of cardiac afferent signals can affect asymmetric value updating in instrumental reward learning.
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Kimura et al. (2022) studied Healthy adults (n=36). Stimulus presentation during cardiac systole vs. Stimulus presentation during cardiac diastole was evaluated on Learning rate for positive vs. negative prediction errors (α+ vs α-) (Cohen's d 0.46, p=<0.01). Presenting discriminative stimuli during cardiac systole resulted in a higher learning rate for positive compared to negative prediction errors, demonstrating that the cardiac cycle affects asymmetric value updating.
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