ArticleBehavioral neuroscience2023
The effects of time horizon and guided choices on explore-exploit decisions in rodents.
Article in Behavioral neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 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
6 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice.iScience · 2026Article
- Rats pursue food and leisure following the same rational principles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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- Performance errors during rodent learning reflect a dynamic choice strategy.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- How do animals weigh conflicting information about reward sources over time? Comparing dynamic averaging models.Animal cognition · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Humans and animals have to balance the need for exploring new options with exploiting known options that yield good outcomes. This tradeoff is known as the explore-exploit dilemma. To better understand the neural mechanisms underlying how humans and animals address the explore-exploit dilemma, a good animal behavioral model is critical. Most previous rodents explore-exploit studies used ethologically unrealistic operant boxes and reversal learning paradigms in which the decision to abandon a bad option is confounded by the need for exploring a novel option for information collection, making it difficult to separate different drives and heuristics for exploration. In this study, we investigated how rodents make explore-exploit decisions using a spatial navigation horizon task (Wilson et al., 2014) adapted to rats to address the above limitations. We compared the rats' performance to that of humans using identical measures. We showed that rats use prior information to effectively guide exploration. In addition, rats use information-driven directed exploration like humans, but the extent to which they explore has the opposite dependance on time horizon than humans. Moreover, we found that free choices and guided choices have different influences on exploration in rodents, a finding that has not yet been tested in humans. This study reveals that the explore-exploit spatial behavior of rats is more complex than previously thought. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
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