Topic: time investment

Our scarcest resource is time. Humans and other animals allocate their time on a vast number of different activities – from reading a paper, pursuing a degree, or foraging for food. Optimal, reward-maximizing, behavioral strategies must balance expected future gains with irrecoverable time investment. However, humans and other animals often succumb to cognitive biases that lead to suboptimal payoffs such as considering sunk costs when investing time to obtain future payoffs. Here we argue that humans, rats, and mice invest time according to optimal predictions given available evidence and subj

From picking dinner to college courses, the choices we make reflect our past experiences and momentary preferences. The value of a choice is inherently subjective, internal to a decision maker, yet we need to identify objective measures to study its neural basis. According to learning theory, value can be inferred from reinforcement history through an algorithmic computation (‘model-inferred value’). In contrast, in behavioral economics, appropriately designed tasks can elicit choice patterns that reveal subjective preferences (‘revealed choice value’). However, the relationship between these

Effective decision-making requires not just resolving difficult choices but evaluating the quality of decisions once they are made. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a key role in decision-making and has been shown to perform metacognitive computations such as post-decision confidence, i.e. the probability of being correct given the subjective evidence. How and where OFC calculations of decision confidence are output to other cortical and sub-cortical circuits is as yet unclear.Here we examined the activity of neurons in the OFC of rats, while they were performing an auditory choice task wi

Decisions rely on integrating information across sensory systems and internal states. Single neurons in orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) typically encode relevant variables for making decisions such as sensory uncertainty and economic value. However, it is unclear whether this neural tuning is idiosyncratic to a specific behavioral context. We investigated to what extent encoding in OFC neural dynamics generalize across contexts, or are context-specific, by analyzing chronic Neuropixels recordings over consecutive sessions in which rats performed two related, but distinct, decision-making tasks. In