Rats delay gratification during a time-based diminishing returns task.

ABSTRACT: The rat is a common animal model used to uncover the neural underpinnings of decision making and their disruption in psychiatric illness. Here, we ask if rats can perform a decision-making task that assesses self-control by delayed gratification in the context of diminishing returns. In this task, rats could choose to press one of two levers. One lever was associated with a fixed delay (FD) schedule that delivered reward after a fixed time delay (10 s). The other lever was associated with a progressive delay (PD) schedule; the delay increased by a fixed amount of time (1 s) after each PD lever press. Rats were tested under two conditions: a reset condition where rats could reset the PD schedule back to its initial 0-s delay by pressing the FD lever and a no-reset condition in which resetti

SUBMITTER: Schuweiler DR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8639657 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature