Exploring the relationship between confidence and Gray’s Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory

Abstract

Studies have shown that Behavioural Inhibition and Behavioural Activation Systems map onto an individual’s personality traits and are sensitive to punishment and reward. Further, studies of punishment and reward have been linked to dopamine pathways in the Basal Ganglia. However, these models have been criticised for being overly simplistic and rooted in animal experimentation. Consequently, little is known about the influence on meta-cognitive processes, such as confidence judgments, on personality and reinforcement learning in humans. By pairing a Go / No-Go reinforcement learning task, used to measure learning from positive and negative feedback, with a confidence rating scale to assess metacognition and comparing these results to self-report measures of reward and punishment sensitivity we hoped to uncover a link between personality and confidence in reinforcement learning. Using multiple linear regression our research found that there is a link between sensitivity to reward and confidence in learning from positive feedback, but no link was found between confidence and sensitivity to punishment. The contribution of metacognition is generally ignored but our results show that it plays an important role in sensitivity to reward which has implication for disorders that involve the Basal Ganglia such as substance abuse. Keywords: [BIS/BAS, Basal Ganglia, Confidence, Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory]