Topic: probabilistic foraging

Essential features of the world are often hidden and must be inferred by constructing internal models based on indirect evidence. During naturalistic foraging, animals must continually choose between trying to exploit a depleting food source at their current location and leaving to explore a new source at the expense of costly travel epochs. When is it best to leave the current site for another one? In a deterministic environment, the optimal strategy is to leave the current site when the immediate rate of reward drops below the average rate - a stimulus-bound strategy, assigning each action a

Signals related to self generated movements are broadcast to non-motor brain regions, and can be detected across wide regions of the forebrain in mice. Indeed, it has been observed that, even during the performance of a task, incidental movements, or ‘fidgets’, account for much more variance in neural activity than task-related movements and task-related variables. Some bodily movements or expressions, such as those of the face, reflect biologically significant expressions of internal state, that is, emotions, which have important relationships with ongoing cognitive processes such as decision

During naturalistic foraging, animals deploy complex decision-making strategies to acquire resources in the presence of uncertain environments. Here we focus on a probabilistic foraging task and how serotonergic (5-HT) neuromodulation affects mouse performance via optogenetic activation of the Dorsal Raphae nucleus (DRN). We show that it is necessary to account for the complexity of behavioral variability across mice in order to uncover the strategies mice deploy to perform the task and how serotonergic neuromodulation affects behavior. While most studies have quantified decision-making perfor

In the current world, it is essential to make valid decisions on adapting exploratory behavioral strategies to flexibly reallocate the resources. Previous studies involving exploration/exploitation dilemma have suggested that the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) plays a decisive role for the neuronal realization of exploratory resource allocation in human and non-human primates (Daw et al., 2006). In the present study, we investigated the performance of Mongolian gerbils in a probabilistic foraging paradigm (adapted from Lottem et al., 2018, Nat Comm.) while simultaneously recording local fil