Decision-making without a brain: how an amoeboid organism solves the two-armed bandit.

ABSTRACT: Several recent studies hint at shared patterns in decision-making between taxonomically distant organisms, yet few studies demonstrate and dissect mechanisms of decision-making in simpler organisms. We examine decision-making in the unicellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum using a classical decision problem adapted from human and animal decision-making studies: the two-armed bandit problem. This problem has previously only been used to study organisms with brains, yet here we demonstrate that a brainless unicellular organism compares the relative qualities of multiple options, integrates over repeated samplings to perform well in random environments, and combines information on reward frequency and magnitude in order to make correct and adaptive decisions. We extend our inquiry by usi

SUBMITTER: Reid CR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4938078 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature