But the more interesting question is: what was happening during the thirty seconds that it took me to walk upstairs?I evidently had motivation to continue walking, or I would have stopped and turned around. But my brainstem hadn’t gotten any ground truth yet that there were good things happening. That’s where “defer-to-predictor mode” comes in! The brainstem, lacking strong evidence about what’s happening, sees a positive valence guess coming out of the striatum and says, in effect, “OK, sure, whatever, I’ll take your word for it.”
It seems like there’s some implication here that motivation and positive valence are the same thing?
Is the claim that evolutionarily early versions of behavioral circuits had approximately the form…
If positive reward:
continue current behavior
else:
try something else
...but that adding in long-term predictors instead allows for the following algorithm?
It seems like there’s some implication here that motivation and positive valence are the same thing?
Is the claim that evolutionarily early versions of behavioral circuits had approximately the form…
If positive reward:
continue current behavior
else:
try something else
...but that adding in long-term predictors instead allows for the following algorithm?
If expectation of positive reward:
continue current behavior
else:
try something else
Yeah I think there’s something to that, see my discussion of run-and-tumble in §6.5.3
Yes, see Valence series §1.5.3, “‘We do things exactly when they’re positive-valence’ should feel almost tautological”