Topic: effort

Making decisions and effort to obtain rewards may depend on various factors, such as the delay to reward, the probability of its occurrence, and the information that can be collected about it. We implemented a task in which pigeons were allowed to choose between three options and to peck at the chosen key to improve the conditions of reward delivery. Pecking more at a first key reduced the 12-s delay before food was delivered with a 33.3% chance, pecking more at a second key increased the initial 33.3% chance of food delivery but did not reduce the 12-s delay, and pecking more at a third key r

Adaptive value-guided decision-making requires weighing up the costs and benefits of pursuing an available opportunity. Though neurons across frontal cortical-basal ganglia circuits have been repeatedly shown to represent decision-related parameters, it is unclear whether and how this information is coordinated. To address this question, we performed large-scale single unit recordings simultaneously across 5 medial/orbital frontal and basal ganglia regions as rats decided whether to pursue varying reward payoffs available at different effort costs. We found that single neurons encoding combina