Associative learning of social value

Getting to know how Using a combination of computational and neuroimaging techniques, Behrens et al. address a key question in social neuroscience: how we learn to value some individuals more than others. It is clear that interactions with other individuals guide behaviour in all social animals, but it is widely held that social learning is distinct from other forms of learning in its mechanism and neural implementation, and that social learning and evaluation mechanisms compete with reward-based learning to drive behaviour. But the new study, which compared the performance of human volunteers in a decision-making task who sometimes had the benefit or disadvantage of advice from a confederate, demonstrates that social valuation is achieved using the same mechanisms that underlie the reward-based learning — that is, by associative learning.