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Subjective costs drive overly patient foraging strategies in rats on an intertemporal foraging task.

ABSTRACT: Laboratory studies of decision making often take the form of two-alternative, forced-choice paradigms. In natural settings, however, many decision problems arise as stay/go choices. We designed a foraging task to test intertemporal decision making in rats via stay/go decisions. Subjects did not follow the rate-maximizing strategy of choosing only food items associated with short delays. Instead, rats were often willing to wait for surprisingly long periods, and consequently earned a lower rate of food intake than they might have by ignoring long-delay options. We tested whether foraging theory or delay discounting models predicted the behavior we observed but found that these models could not account for the strategies subjects selected. Subjects' behavior was well accounted for by a model that incorporated a cost for rejecting potential food items. Interestingly, subjects' cost sensitivity was proportional to environmental richness. These findings are at odds with traditional normative accounts of decision making but are consistent with retrospective considerations having a deleterious influence on decisions (as in the "sunk-cost" effect). More broadly, these findings highlight the utility of complementing existing assays of decision making with tasks that mimic more natural decision topologies.

SUBMITTER: Wikenheiser AM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3657802 | biostudies-literature | 2013 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Subjective costs drive overly patient foraging strategies in rats on an intertemporal foraging task.

Wikenheiser Andrew M AM Stephens David W DW Redish A David AD

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20130429 20

Laboratory studies of decision making often take the form of two-alternative, forced-choice paradigms. In natural settings, however, many decision problems arise as stay/go choices. We designed a foraging task to test intertemporal decision making in rats via stay/go decisions. Subjects did not follow the rate-maximizing strategy of choosing only food items associated with short delays. Instead, rats were often willing to wait for surprisingly long periods, and consequently earned a lower rate o ...[more]

PMID: 23630289

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Project description:Value-based decision-making is of central interest in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, as well as in the context of neuropsychiatric disorders characterised by decision-making impairments. Studies examining (neuro-)computational mechanisms underlying choice behaviour typically focus on participants' decisions. However, there is increasing evidence that option valuation might also be reflected in motor response vigour and eye movements, implicit measures of subjective utility. To examine motor response vigour and visual fixation correlates of option valuation in intertemporal choice, we set up a task where the participants selected an option by pressing a grip force transducer, simultaneously tracking fixation shifts between options. As outlined in our preregistration (https://osf.io/k6jct), we used hierarchical Bayesian parameter estimation to model the choices assuming hyperbolic discounting, compared variants of the softmax and drift diffusion model, and assessed the relationship between response vigour and the estimated model parameters. The behavioural data were best explained by a drift diffusion model specifying a non-linear scaling of the drift rate by the subjective value differences. Replicating previous findings, we found a magnitude effect for temporal discounting, such that higher rewards were discounted less. This magnitude effect was further reflected in motor response vigour, such that stronger forces were exerted in the high vs. the low magnitude condition. Bayesian hierarchical linear regression further revealed higher grip forces, faster response times and a lower number of fixation shifts for trials with higher subjective value differences. An exploratory analysis revealed that subjective value sums across options showed an even more pronounced association with trial-wise grip force amplitudes. Our data suggest that subjective utility or implicit valuation is reflected in motor response vigour and visual fixation patterns during intertemporal choice. Taking into account response vigour might thus provide deeper insight into decision-making, reward valuation and maladaptive changes in these processes, e.g. in the context of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Project description:Research in intertemporal decisions shows that people value future gains less than equivalent but immediate gains by a factor known as the discount rate (i.e., people want a premium for waiting to receive a reward). A robust phenomenon in intertemporal decisions is the finding that the discount rate is larger for small gains than for large gains, termed the magnitude effect. However, the psychological underpinnings of this effect are not yet fully understood. One explanation proposes that intertemporal choices are driven by comparisons of features of the present and future choice options (e.g., information on rewards). According to this explanation, the hypothesis is that the magnitude effect is stronger when the absolute difference between present and future rewards is emphasized, compared to when their relative difference is emphasized. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using one task (the two-choice paradigm) and only for gains (i.e., not losses). It's therefore unclear whether the findings that support the hypothesis can be generalized to different methodological paradigms (e.g., preference matching) and to the domain of losses. To address this question, we conducted experiments using the preference-matching method whereby the premium amounts that people could ask for were framed in terms of either currencies (emphasizing absolute differences) or percentages (emphasizing relative differences). We thus tested the robustness of the evidence in support of the hypothesis that percent framing, relative to currency framing, attenuates the magnitude effect in the domain of gains (Studies 1, 2, and 3) and in the domain of losses (Study 1, 3, and 4). The data were heavily skewed and the assumption of equal variances was violated. Therefore, in place of parametric statistical tests, we calculated and interpreted parametric and nonparametric standardized and unstandardized effect size estimates and their confidence intervals. Overall, the results support the hypothesis.

Dataset Information

Subjective costs drive overly patient foraging strategies in rats on an intertemporal foraging task.

Publications

Subjective costs drive overly patient foraging strategies in rats on an intertemporal foraging task.

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