Reward Valuation in Vision Language Models: Causal Mechanisms Underlying Anhedonia

arXiv:2607.06626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent Vision-Language Models capture increasingly complex aspects of human cognition. Here we ask whether this alignment extends to reward valuation, which we assess in a mechanistic framework built on clinical tests that were developed to evaluate anhedonia and motivational deficits in major depressive disorder. In the brain, anhedonia is frequently linked to dysregulation in the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc) and the broader dopaminergic reward system....