RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Chronic and acute stress promote overexploitation in serial decision-making
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 3618-16
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3618-16.2017
A1 Jennifer K. Lenow
A1 Sara M. Constantino
A1 Nathaniel D. Daw
A1 Elizabeth A. Phelps
YR 2017
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2017/05/10/JNEUROSCI.3618-16.2017.abstract
AB Many decisions that humans make resemble foraging problems in which a currently available, known option must be weighed against an unknown alternative option. In such foraging decisions, the quality of the overall environment can be used as a proxy for estimating the value of future unknown options against which current prospects are compared. We hypothesized that such foraging-like decisions would be characteristically sensitive to stress -- a physiological response that tracks biologically relevant changes in environmental context. Specifically, we hypothesized that stress would lead to more exploitative foraging behavior. To test this, we assessed how acute and chronic stresses as assessed by changes in cortisol response to an acute stress manipulation and subjective scores on a questionnaire assessing recent chronic stress relate to performance in a virtual sequential foraging task. We find that both types of stress bias human decision-makers toward overexploiting current options, relative to an optimal policy. These findings suggest a possible computational role of stress in decision-making by which stress biases judgments of environmental quality.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTMany of the most biologically relevant decisions we make are foraging-like decisions about whether to stay with a current option or search the environment for a potentially better one. In the current study, we find that both acute physiological and chronic subjective stress are associated with greater overexploitation, or staying at current options for longer than is optimal. These results suggest a domain-general way in which stress might bias foraging decisions through changing one's appraisal of the overall quality of the environment. These novel findings not only have implications for understanding how this important class of foraging decisions might be biologically implemented but also for understanding the computational role of stress in behavior and cognition more broadly.