Topic: energetic cost

Imagine that it’s tea time and you’d like to eat a distant cookie. The speed at which you will walk toward this cookie will be modulated by your sensitivities to the energetic cost of movement (e.g., lazy vs. energetic), to the cost of time (e.g., patient vs. impatient), and to the reward (e.g., hungry vs. sated). How these sensitivities modulate behavior and their neural implementation remain poorly understood. Here, we tackled this question by combining experimental and theoretical approaches. We developed an automated foraging task in which rats have to run back and forth on a treadmill to