My current working theory of human social interactions does not involve multiple reward signals. Instead it’s a bunch of rules like “If you’re in state X, and you empathetically simulate someone in state Y, then send reward R and switch to state Z”. See my post “Little glimpses of empathy” as the foundation of social emotions. These rules would be implemented in the hypothalamus and/or brainstem.
(Plus some involvement from brainstem sensory-processing circuits that can run hardcoded classifiers that return information about things like whether a person is present right now, and maybe some aspects of their tone of voice and facial expressions, etc. Then those data can also be inputs to the “bunch of rules”.)
I haven’t thought it through in any level of detail or read the literature (except superficially). Maybe ask me again in a few months… :-)
Thanks!
My current working theory of human social interactions does not involve multiple reward signals. Instead it’s a bunch of rules like “If you’re in state X, and you empathetically simulate someone in state Y, then send reward R and switch to state Z”. See my post “Little glimpses of empathy” as the foundation of social emotions. These rules would be implemented in the hypothalamus and/or brainstem.
(Plus some involvement from brainstem sensory-processing circuits that can run hardcoded classifiers that return information about things like whether a person is present right now, and maybe some aspects of their tone of voice and facial expressions, etc. Then those data can also be inputs to the “bunch of rules”.)
I haven’t thought it through in any level of detail or read the literature (except superficially). Maybe ask me again in a few months… :-)