A progressive ratio task with costly resets reveals adaptive effort-delay tradeoffs.

ABSTRACT: The Progressive Ratio (PR) schedule is a popular test for measuring the motivational value of a reinforcer, in which subjects must exert an increasing amount of work to obtain each successive reward. Despite its popularity, the PR task hinges on a low-dimensional behavioral readout-breakpoint, or the maximum work requirement subjects are willing to complete before abandoning the task. Here, we show that with a simple modification, the PR task can be transformed into an optimization problem reminiscent of the patch-leaving foraging scenario, which has been analyzed extensively by behavioral ecologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In the Progressive Ratio with Reset (PRR) task, rats perform the PR task on one lever, but can press a second lever to reset the current ratio requirement

SUBMITTER: Rivera ZMG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12157455 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature