The effects of time horizon and guided choices on explore-exploit decisions in rodents.

ABSTRACT: Humans and animals have to balance the need for exploring new options with exploiting known options that yield good outcomes. This tradeoff is known as the explore-exploit dilemma. To better understand the neural mechanisms underlying how humans and animals address the explore-exploit dilemma, a good animal behavioral model is critical. Most previous rodents explore-exploit studies used ethologically unrealistic operant boxes and reversal learning paradigms in which the decision to abandon a bad option is confounded by the need for exploring a novel option for information collection, making it difficult to separate different drives and heuristics for exploration. In this study, we investigated how rodents make explore-exploit decisions using a spatial navigation horizon task (Wilson et al.

SUBMITTER: Wang S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10787949 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature