Ongoing, rational calibration of reward-driven perceptual biases
- University of Pennsylvania, United States
Abstract
Decision-making is often interpreted in terms of normative computations that maximize a particular reward function for stable, average behaviors. Aberrations from the reward-maximizing solutions, either across subjects or across different sessions for the same subject, are often interpreted as reflecting poor learning or physical limitations. Here we show that such aberrations may instead reflect the involvement of additional satisficing and heuristic principles. For an asymmetric-reward perceptual decision-making task, three monkeys produced adaptive biases in response to changes in reward asymmetries and perceptual sensitivity. Their choices and response times were consistent with a normative accumulate-to-bound process. However, their context-dependent adjustments to this process deviated slightly but systematically from the reward-maximizing solutions. These adjustments were instead consistent with a rational process to find satisficing solutions based on the gradient of each monkey's reward-rate function. These results suggest new dimensions for assessing the rational and idiosyncratic aspects of flexible decision-making.
Data availability
Raw data used during this study are included as the supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Eye Institute (R01-EY022411)
- Joshua I Gold
- Long Ding
University of Pennsylvania (University Research Foundation Pilot Award)
- Long Ding
Hearst Foundations (Graduate student fellowship)
- Yunshu Fan
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All training and experimental procedures were in accordance with the National Institutes of Health Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and were approved by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (#804726).
Copyright
© 2018, Fan et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,376
- views
-
- 311
- downloads
-
- 52
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Ongoing, rational calibration of reward-driven perceptual biases
eLife 7:e36018.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.36018
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
The infralimbic cortex (IL) is essential for flexible behavioral responses to threatening environmental events. Reactive behaviors such as freezing or flight are adaptive in some contexts, but in others a strategic avoidance behavior may be more advantageous. IL has been implicated in avoidance, but the contribution of distinct IL neural subtypes with differing molecular identities and wiring patterns is poorly understood. Here, we study IL parvalbumin (PV) interneurons in mice as they engage in active avoidance behavior, a behavior in which mice must suppress freezing in order to move to safety. We find that activity in inhibitory PV neurons increases during movement to avoid the shock in this behavioral paradigm, and that PV activity during movement emerges after mice have experienced a single shock, prior to learning avoidance. PV neural activity does not change during movement toward cued rewards or during general locomotion in the open field, behavioral paradigms where freezing does not need to be suppressed to enable movement. Optogenetic suppression of PV neurons increases the duration of freezing and delays the onset of avoidance behavior, but does not affect movement toward rewards or general locomotion. These data provide evidence that IL PV neurons support strategic avoidance behavior by suppressing freezing.
