ArticleCurrent biology : CB2021
Divergent Strategies for Learning in Males and Females.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 61 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
61 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sex-biased computations underlying differential set shift performance in mice.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Citric acid water as an alternative to food restriction to motivate task performance in mice during touchscreen testing.Lab animal · 2026Article
- Development of visual-stimulus reversal learning-memory in mice is dependent on social interaction.iScience · 2026Article
- Exploiting correlations across trials and behavioral sessions to improve neural decoding.Neuron · 2026Article
- Uncertainty and reward histories have distinct effects on decisions after wins and losses.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Sex differences in task engagement and lapse rate during reward learning.Oxford open neuroscience · 2026Article
- IntelliCage protocols using incentive-disincentive dual motivation work with male as well as female mice and reveal sex differences in motivated behavior.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Premature release of action sequences in adolescent male rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Female rats adopt a safety-first strategy in a high-conflict platform mediated avoidance task.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Sex-specific exploration accounts for differences in valence learning in male and female mice.eLife · 2025Article
- Noisy Memory Generates Value in Changing Environments.Adaptive behavior · 2025Article
- Exploiting correlations across trials and behavioral sessions to improve neural decoding.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Data-Driven Analysis Identifies Novel Modulation of Social Behavior in Female Mice Witnessing Chronic Social Defeat Stress.Biological psychiatry · 2025Article
- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Social aloofness is associated with non-social explore-exploit decisions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- 16p11.2 duplication shows early male-biased impacts on reward learning, but NMDA receptor antagonism reduces optimal choice selection in both wildtypes and 16p11.2 duplication.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- In vivo calcium extrusion from accumbal astrocytes reduces anxiety-like behaviors but increases compulsive-like responses and compulsive ethanol drinking in mice.Neuropharmacology · 2025Article
- Nucleus Accumbens Dopamine Encodes the Trace Period during Appetitive Pavlovian Conditioning.eNeuro · 2025Article
- Effects of sex and estrous cycle on action-outcome contingencies.Behavioural brain research · 2025Article
1 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
A frequent assumption in value-based decision-making tasks is that agents make decisions based on the feature dimension that reward probabilities vary on. However, in complex, multidimensional environments, stimuli can vary on multiple dimensions at once, meaning that the feature deserving the most credit for outcomes is not always obvious. As a result, individuals may vary in the strategies used to sample stimuli across dimensions, and these strategies may have an unrecognized influence on decision-making. Sex is a proxy for multiple genetic and endocrine influences on behavior, including how environments are sampled. In this study, we examined the strategies adopted by female and male mice as they learned the value of stimuli that varied in both image and location in a visually cued two-armed bandit, allowing two possible dimensions to learn about. Female mice acquired the correct image-value associations more quickly than male mice, preferring a fundamentally different strategy. Female mice were more likely to constrain their decision-space early in learning by preferentially sampling one location over which images varied. Conversely, male mice were more likely to be inconsistent, changing their choice frequently and responding to the immediate experience of stochastic rewards. Individual strategies were related to sex-biased changes in neuronal activation in early learning. Together, we find that in mice, sex is associated with divergent strategies for sampling and learning about the world, revealing substantial unrecognized variability in the approaches implemented during value-based decision making.
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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.