Topic: expected reward

Identifying situations in which exploration could be beneficial, and learning from such choices, is critical for survival in complex environments. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how animals adapt their choice strategies depending on the potential benefits of exploration and what the neural underpinning of this ability is. We thus adapted a 2-option forced-choice task in which 3 rhesus macaques made choices while the information and the feedback they received was being manipulated: (i) feedback was given about either just the chosen option or both the chosen and unchosen counterfactual option

Humans and several animal species, including monkeys, rats, and pigeons, are often strongly motivated to seek information about uncertain future rewards. Remarkably, they prefer information even when it has no objective value for controlling the outcome, suggesting that information has subjective value of its own. In recent years there has been an explosion of research on information seeking in humans and animal models. However, a critical unanswered question is whether the computations that assign subjective value to information are conserved between humans and other species. If so, we could