Text

theses

Human decision-making is often motivated by a pursuit of valued goals, such as food and money. Such pursuits can be influenced not only by the actual value of the goal (e.g., $5 vs. $10), but also importantly by the social context in which they occur (e.g., with a close peer vs. with a business colleague). The aim of this dissertation was to characterize how social information affects the subjective and neural representations of reward-processing. Neural structures within corticobasal ganglia loops support reward-processing and motivated behavior in part by coding value signals for expected and experienced outcomes, as well as the actions that lead to them. However, most day-to-day experiences occur within varying social contexts. We may thus place higher value on social outcomes such as approval or acceptance, particularly from members of our social networks (e.g., close friends). It remains to be seen how information regarding social network may modulate reward-processing. A novel manipulation of social network was applied to an established reward-processing paradigm such that achieved outcomes were experienced with a close friend (in-network), a confederate (out-of- network), or a non-social entity. Across cooperative and competitive contexts, social network significantly modulated the subjective experience of outcome value and associated computations generated in reward circuitry. To further explore how the effects of social context on reward-processing can modulate behavior, we employed an economic paradigm––the trust game––to investigate learning of partner reputation (e.g., will s/he reciprocate my generosity). We examined the role of prior social impressions formed from direct experience with unknown fictional others in an unrelated domain on subsequent trust game interactions with these same partners. We subsequently applied our social network manipulation to the trust game to investigate how real-life experience informs behavior in trust interactions. In both contexts, previous social impressions significantly influenced participants’ trust decisions. Further, the ability to update beliefs about partner reputation relied on learning-related outcome value signals in neural reward circuitry. In sum, these studies extend the current understanding of reward-processing, demonstrating that the value of a reward is subject to the strong influence of the social context in which it is experienced.

ETD_4404

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Dominic Stephen Fareri

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10002600001.ETD.000067592

doi:10.7282/T3C8280B

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.