ArticleScientific reports2019
Macaques are risk-averse in a freely moving foraging task.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stochastic choice drives variability in patch foraging decisions in humans and rats.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Temporal Structure of Reward Availability and Sensory Uncertainty Modulate Allocation Dynamics in Naturalistic Foraging.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Primate neuroethology: a new synthesis.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Neural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gaze.ArXiv · 2026Article
- Sex and Age Differences in Decision-Making Under Risk by Wild Balinese Long-Tailed Macaques (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Freely foraging macaques value information in ambiguous terrains.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Motivation, attention, and uncertainty: insights from animal and human research and implications for addiction.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Article
- Risk preferences depend on environmental richness in rats performing a patch-foraging task.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Complex behavior from intrinsic motivation to occupy future action-state path space.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Individual risk attitudes arise from noise in neurocognitive magnitude representations.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Dynamic prospect theory: Two core decision theories coexist in the gambling behavior of monkeys and humans.Science advances · 2023Article
- The effects of time horizon and guided choices on explore-exploit decisions in rodents.Behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Hierarchical organization of rhesus macaque behavior.Oxford open neuroscience · 2023Article
- A neuronal prospect theory model in the brain reward circuitry.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Automated pose estimation in primates.American journal of primatology · 2022Review
- The Promise of Behavioral Tracking Systems for Advancing Primate Animal Welfare.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
- Non-human primates use combined rules when deciding under ambiguity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The adaptive value of probability distortion and risk-seeking in macaques' decision-making.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) appear to be robustly risk-seeking in computerized gambling tasks typically used for electrophysiology. This behavior distinguishes them from many other animals, which are risk-averse, albeit measured in more naturalistic contexts. We wondered whether macaques' risk preferences reflect their evolutionary history or derive from the less naturalistic elements of task design associated with the demands of physiological recording. We assessed macaques' risk attitudes in a task that is somewhat more naturalistic than many that have previously been used: subjects foraged at four feeding stations in a large enclosure. Patches (i.e., stations), provided either stochastically or non-stochastically depleting rewards. Subjects' patch residence times were longer at safe than at risky stations, indicating a preference for safe options. This preference was not attributable to a win-stay-lose-shift heuristic and reversed as the environmental richness increased. These findings highlight the lability of risk attitudes in macaques and support the hypothesis that the ecological validity of a task can influence the expression of risk preference.
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