ArticleeLife2019
Positive and negative incentive contrasts lead to relative value perception in ants.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Combining social and private information: How ants use pheromones and learnt cues to navigate.Learning & behavior · 2026Review
- A high-throughput and sensitive method for food preference assays in the argentine ant.Pest management science · 2025Article
- Toxic bait abandonment by an invasive ant is driven by aversive memories.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Economic foraging in a floral marketplace: asymmetrically dominated decoy effects in bumblebees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Male attractiveness is subjective to exposure to males of different attractiveness in fruit flies.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Learning modifies attention during bumblebee visual search.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2024Article
- Contextuality in Collective Intelligence: Not There Yet.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Article
- No coordination required for resources allocation during colony fission in a social insect? An individual-based model reproduces empirical patterns.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Label-based expectations affect incentive contrast effects in bumblebees.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Irrational risk aversion in an ant.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Learned valuation during forage decision-making in cuttlefish.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Ants resort to heuristics when facing relational-learning tasks they cannot solve.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Negative feedback: ants choose unoccupied over occupied food sources and lay more pheromone to them.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Trail Pheromone Does Not Modulate Subjective Reward Evaluation inFrontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- The multi-dimensional nature of information drives prioritization of private over social information in ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Article
- Tasting the unexpected: disconfirmation of expectations leads to lower perceived food value in an invertebrate.Biology letters · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans usually assess things not according to their absolute value, but relative to reference points - a main tenant of Prospect Theory. For example, people rate a new salary relative to previous salaries and salaries of their peers, rather than absolute income. We demonstrate a similar effect in an insect: ants expecting to find low-quality food showed higher acceptance of medium-quality food than ants expecting medium quality, and vice versa for high expectations. Further experiments demonstrate that these contrast effects arise from cognitive rather than mere sensory or pre-cognitive perceptual causes. Social information gained inside the nest can also serve as a reference point: the quality of food received from other ants affected the perceived value of food found later. Value judgement is a key element in decision making, and thus relative value perception strongly influences which option is chosen and ultimately how all animals make decisions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.