Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Testing Models Of Context-Dependent Outcome Encoding In Reinforcement Learning, William M. Hayes Iv

Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies of reinforcement learning (RL) have established that choice outcomes are encoded in a context-dependent fashion. Several computational models have been proposed to explain context-dependent encoding, including reference point centering and range adaptation models. The former assumes that outcomes are centered around a running estimate of the average reward in each choice context, while the latter assumes that outcomes are compared to the minimum reward and then scaled by an estimate of the range of outcomes in each choice context. However, there are other computational mechanisms that can explain context dependence in RL. In the present study, a frequency …