Stress diminishes outcome but enhances response representations during instrumental learning

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
Metrics

Abstract

Stress may shift behavioural control from a goal-directed system that encodes action-outcome relationships, to a habitual system that learns stimulus-response associations. Although this shift to habits is highly relevant for stress-related psychopathologies, limitations of existing behavioural paradigms hinders research from answering the fundamental question of whether the stress-induced bias to habits is due to reduced outcome processing, or enhanced response processing at the time of stimulus presentation - or both. Here, we used EEG-based multivariate pattern analysis to decode neural outcome representations crucial for goal-directed control, as well as response representations during instrumental learning. We show that stress reduced outcome representations but enhanced response representations. Both were directly associated with a behavioural index of habitual responding. Furthermore, changes in outcome and response representations were uncorrelated, suggesting that these may reflect distinct processes. Our findings indicate that habitual behaviour under stress may be the result of both enhanced stimulus-response processing and diminished outcome processing.

Data availability

Data reported in this manuscript are available from the website: https://github.com/08122019/From-goal-directed-action-to-habit.

Article and author information

Author details

Jacqueline Katharina Meier

Department of Cognitive Psychology, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Bernhard P Staresina

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0558-9745
Lars Schwabe

Department of Cognitive Psychology, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

For correspondence
lars.schwabe@uni-hamburg.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4429-4373

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SCHW1357/23-1)

Lars Schwabe

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All participants provided informed consent before participation in the experiment. The experiment was performed in line with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology and Human Movement Sciences at the Universität Hamburg (2018_197_Schwabe).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.