Name: Tom Osborn
Type: User
Company: Shamiri Institute
Bio: B.A. Psychology, Harvard. Co-Founder, Shamiri Institute & Bobea Group. Research Collaborator, Cushman Lab & Weisz Lab (Harvard).
Twitter: tomleeosborn
Location: Cambridge, MA
Blog: tomleeosborn.com
Tom Osborn's Projects
We investigated the prevalence of, as well as the psychological and sociodemographic correlates of, depression and anxiety symptoms in a large, nationally representative sample of adolescents in Kenya, a low-income SSA country. A secondary aim of the study was to use a machine learning approach to see which sociodemographic factors, if any, could be used to predict depression and anxiety amongst Kenyan adolescents.
We build on prior research that shows signatures of “model-free” learning and decision-making in humans. We interrogate the possibility of an analogous mechanism of observational learning. The key property of model-free learning is that actions are reinforced proportional to their history of reward, without taking into account an explicit model of causal dynamics that lead to that reward. We ask whether actions are also reinforced in proportion to the observed history of reward realized by others.