Date of Award

4-4-2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Elizabeth Pierce

Second Advisor

Keith Bush

Abstract

Early life trauma may disrupt the family dynamic by altering trust. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the brain mechanisms that encode trust. University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) researchers are currently conducting a triadic cooperative experiment (TCE) while participants’ brain activity is concurrently being recorded via a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The TCE is a socioeconomic task in which two caregivers and an adolescent take turns transferring wealth to each other which is multiplied by a constant factor. The task encourages cooperation between participants by first, randomly assigning who must give wealth on any given turn and second, utilizing a random number of turns. In this dissertation, we construct the optimal solution to this task, using reinforcement learning, and then we identify human strategies in real instances of the TCE making use of this optimal solution. We then predict brain mechanisms that drive human strategies in the TCE, and family dynamics from brain and behavioral data.

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