ArticleCommunications biology2020
Mice adaptively generate choice variability in a deterministic task.
Article in Communications biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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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
6 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Stochastic choice drives variability in patch foraging decisions in humans and rats.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Retrieval of contextual memory can be predicted by CA3 remapping and is differentially influenced by NMDAR activity in rat hippocampus subregions.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Strategy inference during learning via cognitive activity-based credit assignment models.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Instruction effects on randomness in sequence generation.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Mice exhibit stochastic and efficient action switching during probabilistic decision making.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A theory of memory for binary sequences: Evidence for a mental compression algorithm in humans.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
13 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Can decisions be made solely by chance? Can variability be intrinsic to the decision-maker or is it inherited from environmental conditions? To investigate these questions, we designed a deterministic setting in which mice are rewarded for non-repetitive choice sequences, and modeled the experiment using reinforcement learning. We found that mice progressively increased their choice variability. Although an optimal strategy based on sequences learning was theoretically possible and would be more rewarding, animals used a pseudo-random selection which ensures high success rate. This was not the case if the animal is exposed to a uniform probabilistic reward delivery. We also show that mice were blind to changes in the temporal structure of reward delivery once they learned to choose at random. Overall, our results demonstrate that a decision-making process can self-generate variability and randomness, even when the rules governing reward delivery are neither stochastic nor volatile.
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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.