In this project, we are testing how reinforcement learning develops during childhood and adolescence.
To this aim, we are asking children ages 7 - 18 to play 4 game-like tasks that have already been used in previous research:
- The 4-choice decision task: Johnson, C., Wilbrecht, L., (2011). Juvenile mice show greater flexibility in multiple choice reversal learning than adults, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 1(4), 540-551, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2011.05.008
- The reinforcement-learning-working-memory (RLWM) task: Collins, A. G. E., Brown, J. K., Gold, J. M., Waltz, J. A., & Frank, M. J. (2014). Working Memory Contributions to Reinforcement Learning Impairments in Schizophrenia. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(41), 13747�13756. http://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0989-14.2014
- The butterfly task: Davidow, J. Y., Foerde, K., Galv�n, A., Shohamy, D. (2016). An Upside to Reward Sensitivity: The Hippocampus Supports Enhanced Reinforcement Learning in Adolescence. Neuron, 92(1), 93�99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2016.08.031
- The probabilistic switching task: Tai, L.-H., Moses Lee, A., Benavidez, N., Bonci, A., Wilbrecht, L. (2012). Transient stimulation of distinct subpopulations of striatal neurons mimics changes in action value. Nature Neuroscience, 15, 1281�1289. http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v15/n9/full/nn.3188.html
This repository contains code for these 4 game-like tasks and will contain the code used to analyze the obtained data.
If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to contact me: maria.eckstein@berkeley.edu