Reinforcement learning of adaptive control strategies.

In some places where biking is popular, cities have installed bike-specific traffic lights. While helpful, they can sometimes cause internal conflict when the traffic light for the general road traffic indicates you should stop, but a bike-specific green traffic light suggests you can proceed. Small action conflicts like this are ubiquitous in our everyday lives.

In our study recently published in Communications Psychology, we sought out to investigate if people become better at dealing with such conflicts if we reinforce them after successfully resolving them. We studied this by rewarding participants for correct performance in a task with many conflicts, using one critical manipulation. Namely, uninstructed to participants, one group was sometimes rewarded with more money if they managed to correctly respond to words that induced conflicting actions, while another group was rewarded more after successfully responding to words without any conflict. If you like to know more about what makes a word a conflict word, check out our full article.