The Ecological Rationality of Impulsive Choice in Rats

大鼠冲动选择的生态理性

• 批准号: 1305977
• 负责人: Aaron Redish
• 金额: $ 19.79万
• 依托单位: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-01 至 2015-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1305977&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Ecological; Rationality; Impulsive; Choice; Rats

Impulsive choice can be defined as a failure to maximize total gains when choosing between options that are available at different times. This failure is often ascribed to overly-fast discounting of delayed options (i.e., the value of delayed options is decreased as a function of the delay). Such behavior is thought to be a key component of many broader issues concerning society, such as scholastic failure, debt, aggression, and various mental disorders like addiction. Impulsive choice stands out as a topic that has been, and must be, studied through multiple scientific disciplines: psychologists have measured impulsivity through a wide variety of tasks in a number of populations (e.g., children, non-human animals); neurobiologists have identified neural systems and brain structures that seem to affect impulsive choice; and psychopharmacologists have examined the influence of pharmacological agents on impulsive behavior. In the face of these varied lines of work, there is growing agreement that impulsivity is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that is unlikely to be understood through any single approach. Intellectual Merit: This project is an interdisciplinary approach to studying impulsivity that integrates tools and concepts from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral ecology that helps to elucidate both the mechanisms involved in impulsivity, as well as the evolutionary causes of such behavior. Specifically, this project extends and tests the ecological rationality hypothesis, which states that impulsive choice is the product of placing evolved cognitive mechanisms for foraging into evolutionarily novel situations in the laboratory (such as standard delay-discounting tasks in which subjects choose between a smaller-sooner option and a larger-later option). Foraging behavior can be thought of as a series of choices to either stay in a patch of resources and exploit it or leave the patch to look for other possibilities. This project (i) replicates this basic finding in a new species by developing a new methodology for assessing impulsive choice in rats, (ii) further investigates the discrepancy between how decisions are made in the two types of tasks, and (iii) gains a detailed understanding of the neural mechanisms involved in choice by comparing neural representations of value during decisions in both types of task. Broader Impacts: Because this project exists at the intersection of several disciplines, the results and the new methods that are developed are of interest to a wide variety of scientists (e.g., psychologists, economists, biologists); and because a deeper understanding of impulsive choice may benefit the study of several mental disorders (e.g., addiction, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) and other major societal concerns, the results are also of interest to those developing treatment and policy.

冲动选择可以定义为在不同时间可用的选项之间选择时，无法最大程度地提高总收益。这种故障通常被归因于延迟选项的过度折扣（即，延迟选项的价值随延迟的函数而降低）。这种行为被认为是许多有关社会的更广泛问题的关键组成部分，例如学术失败，债务，侵略和诸如成瘾等各种精神障碍。冲动的选择是通过多个科学学科研究的话题，必须被研究：心理学家通过许多人群（例如，儿童，非人类动物）来衡量冲动性。神经生物学家已经确定了似乎影响冲动选择的神经系统和大脑结构。心理药理学家研究了药理学剂对冲动行为的影响。面对这些各种各样的工作，越来越同意冲动是一种多维现象，不太可能通过任何一种方法来理解。智力优点：该项目是一种研究冲动性的跨学科方法，它整合了心理学，神经科学和行为生态学的工具和概念，有助于阐明冲动性涉及的机制以及这种行为的进化原因。具体而言，该项目扩展并测试了生态理性假说，该假说指出，冲动选择是将进化的认知机制放置在实验室中进化新颖情况的产物（例如，在该任务中（例如，对象在该任务中，在这些任务中选择在其中选择一个较小的Sooner选项和较小的选择和较大的产品））。可以将觅食行为视为一系列选择，要么留在一块资源中，并利用它，要么离开补丁以寻找其他可能性。该项目（i）通过开发一种评估大鼠冲动性选择的新方法在新物种中复制这一基本发现，（ii）进一步研究了两种任务中的决策的差异，（iii）获得了对在两种任务的决策中对价值的神经代表的详细理解。更广泛的影响：因为该项目存在于几个学科的交汇处，因此开发的结果和新方法对各种科学家（例如，心理学家，经济学家，生物学家）感兴趣；而且，由于对冲动选择的更深入的了解可能会受益于对几种精神障碍（例如成瘾，注意力缺陷/多动障碍）和其他主要社会问题的研究，因此那些制定待遇和政策的人也感兴趣的结果也引起了人们的兴趣。