ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2022
Rat Anterior Cingulate Cortex Continuously Signals Decision Variables in a Patch Foraging Task.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Noninvasive Brain Stimulation over the Frontopolar Cortex Promotes Willingness to Exert Cognitive Effort in a Foraging-Like Sequential Choice Task.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Trial
- Article
- Neural basis of compositional control.Nature · 2026Article
- Foraging models explain human exploration in uncertain tasks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Anterior cingulate cortex monitors action state and action content in complex associative learning.eLife · 2026Article
- Shared and distinct features of common effort-based decision-making paradigms and their relation to brain structure and neuropsychiatric conditions: An integrated narrative review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Human foraging strategies flexibly adapt to resource distribution and time constraints.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural representation of the decisional reference point in monkeys.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience.Trends in neurosciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Article
- Observational activation of anterior cingulate cortical neurons coordinates hippocampal replay in social learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Foraging animals use dynamic Bayesian updating to model meta-uncertainty in environment representations.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Humans forage for reward in reinforcement learning tasks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Meta-Analysis Reveals That Explore-Exploit Decisions are Dissociable by Activation in the Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex, Anterior Insula, and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- No matter what you do, travel is travel in visual foraging.Vision research · 2024Article
- Common neural choice signals can emerge artefactually amid multiple distinct value signals.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- The Projection-Specific Noradrenergic Modulation of Perseverative Spatial Behavior in Adult Male Rats.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Sex mechanisms as nonbinary influences on cognitive diversity.Hormones and behavior · 2024Review
- Research on re-searching: interrupted foraging is not disrupted foraging.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
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6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In patch foraging tasks, animals must decide whether to remain with a depleting resource or to leave it in search of a potentially better source of reward. In such tasks, animals consistently follow the general predictions of optimal foraging theory (the marginal value theorem; MVT): to leave a patch when the reward rate in the current patch depletes to the average reward rate across patches. Prior studies implicate an important role for the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in foraging decisions based on MVT: within single trials, ACC activity increases immediately preceding foraging decisions, and across trials, these dynamics are modulated as the value of staying in the patch depletes to the average reward rate. Here, we test whether these activity patterns reflect dynamic encoding of decision-variables and whether these signals are directly involved in decision-making. We developed a leaky accumulator model based on the MVT that generates estimates of decision variables within and across trials, and tested model predictions against ACC activity recorded from male rats performing a patch foraging task. Model predicted changes in MVT decision variables closely matched rat ACC activity. Next, we pharmacologically inactivated ACC in male rats to test the contribution of these signals to decision-making. ACC inactivation had a profound effect on rats' foraging decisions and response times (RTs) yet rats still followed the MVT decision rule. These findings indicate that the ACC encodes foraging-related variables for reasons unrelated to patch-leaving decisions.
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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.