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{
    "pk": 49218,
    "title": "When 0 is good: instrumental learning with counterintuitive goals decreases working memory engagement",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "<p>Humans are adept at setting goals quickly and flexibly in their daily lives. Previous research has shown that people can assign rewarding properties to abstract or novel outcomes and use them to guide behavior. However, the mechanisms supporting this flexibility and their impact on learning processes, such as working memory (WM) or slower incremental systems, remain unclear. To address this, we designed an instrumental learning task in which participants learned stimulus-action associations by pursuing either standard goals (+1) or counterintuitive goals (+0) under varying WM loads. Our behavioral and modeling results revealed that when pursuing counterintuitive goals, humans learned more slowly and shifted their reliance from WM to habit-like associative processes, despite both processes remaining functionally intact. Additionally, we replicated previous findings showing that humans do not rely on reinforcement learning (RL) processes but instead integrate WM and habit-like processes to learn the associations. This interplay between WM and habit-like processes may allow a more resource-efficient approach to pursuing diverse goals. Our findings shed light on the breadth and cost of people's ability to flexibly learn and pursue any goal.</p>",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Psychology; Learning; Memory; Computational Modeling; Mathematical modeling; Qualitative Analysis; Quantitative Behavior; Statistics"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Oral Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dr1n611",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Ti-Fen",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Pan",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Gaia",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Molinaro",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Anne",
            "middle_name": "GE",
            "last_name": "Collins",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49218/galley/37179/download/"
        },
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49218/galley/38724/download/"
        }
    ]
}