Instrumental learning of traits versus rewards: dissociable neural correlates and effects on choice

Humans learn about people and objects through positive and negative experiences, yet they can also look beyond the immediate reward of an interaction to encode trait-level attributes. We found that perceivers encoded both reward and trait-level information through feedback in an instrumental learning task, but relied more heavily on trait representations in cross-context decisions. Both learning types implicated ventral striatum, but trait learning also recruited a network associated with social impression formation.