Rats pursue food and leisure following the same rational principles.

ABSTRACT: Animals in the wild must balance multiple, potentially mutually-exclusive goals simultaneously in order to survive. Yet laboratory tests of decision making often investigate how animals optimize their behavior to achieve a single, well-defined goal, which is often a nutritive reward. Thus, how animals solve multi-objective optimization problems is not well understood. Here, we devised an ethologically-inspired decision making task to examine how rats balance the pursuit of food and non-food reinforcement. Rats performed a free-choice patch-foraging task, in which they could earn food in one location (food patch) or interact with a rodent play structure in a different location (toy patch). The cost of switching between patches was manipulated by requiring rats to endure a long or short "tra

SUBMITTER: Logue RS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12324180 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature