1. Rumination Derails Reinforcement Learning With Possible Implications for Ineffective Behavior
- Author
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Evan M. Forman, Nina J. Rothstein, Yael Niv, Chris R. Sims, John Kounios, Peter F. Hitchcock, and Fengqing Zhang
- Subjects
Adaptive behavior ,Clinical Psychology ,Rumination ,medicine ,Reinforcement learning ,medicine.symptom ,Psychology ,Article ,Cognitive psychology - Abstract
How does rumination affect reinforcement learning—the ubiquitous process by which people adjust behavior after error to behave more effectively in the future? In a within-subjects design ( N = 49), we tested whether experimentally manipulated rumination disrupts reinforcement learning in a multidimensional learning task previously shown to rely on selective attention. Rumination impaired performance, yet unexpectedly, this impairment could not be attributed to decreased attentional breadth (quantified using a decay parameter in a computational model). Instead, trait rumination (between subjects) was associated with higher decay rates (implying narrower attention) but not with impaired performance. Our task-performance results accord with the possibility that state rumination promotes stress-generating behavior in part by disrupting reinforcement learning. The trait-rumination finding accords with the predictions of a prominent model of trait rumination (the attentional-scope model). More work is needed to understand the specific mechanisms by which state rumination disrupts reinforcement learning.
- Published
- 2021