An Animal Model of Decision Making: Vicarious Trial-and-Error in Tasks Requiring Memory for Visual Associations or Spatial Locations

Dudchenko, Paul A.; Bett, David; Allison, Elizabeth; Kaefer, Karola; Wood, Emma R.

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-4792-0_58

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The authors also found that rats made more vicarious trial‐and‐errors (VTEs)—back‐and‐forth head movements at a choice point—during laps where the delay was changed as opposed to those where the delay was stable. These VTEs have been hypothesized to be a behavioral manifestation of deliberative decision making (Johnson and Redish, ; Dudchenko et al, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hippocampus, delay discounting, and vicarious trial‐and‐error

et al. 2014

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In decision‐making, an immediate reward is usually preferred to a delayed reward, even if the latter is larger. We tested whether the hippocampus is necessary for this form of temporal discounting, and for vicarious trial‐and‐error at the decision point. Rats were trained on a recently developed, adjustable delay‐discounting task (Papale et al. (2012) Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 12:513–526), which featured a choice between a small, nearly immediate reward, and a larger, delayed reward. Rats then received either hippocampus or sham lesions. Animals with hippocampus lesions adjusted the delay for the larger reward to a level similar to that of sham‐lesioned animals, suggesting a similar valuation capacity. However, the hippocampus lesion group spent significantly longer investigating the small and large rewards in the first part of the sessions, and were less sensitive to changes in the amount of reward in the large reward maze arm. Both sham‐ and hippocampus‐lesioned rats showed a greater amount of vicarious trial‐and‐error on trials in which the delay was adjusted. In a nonadjusting version of the delay discounting task, animals with hippocampus lesions showed more variability in their preference for a larger reward that was delayed by 10 s compared with sham‐lesioned animals. To verify the lesion behaviorally, rat were subsequently trained on a water maze task, and rats with hippocampus lesions were significantly impaired compared with sham‐lesioned animals. The findings on the delay discounting tasks suggest that damage to the hippocampus may impair the detection of reward magnitude. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hippocampus, delay discounting, and vicarious trial‐and‐error

et al. 2014

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“…The subtlety of the lesion effects on VTE performance may therefore reflect the use of a task that can be solved in part by using circuitry outside the hippocampus. Alternatively, animals may show VTEs for different reasons, only some of which relate to spatial deliberations (Dudchenko et al, 2013 ; Papale et al, 2012 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The neural substrates of deliberative decision making: contrasting effects of hippocampus lesions on performance and vicarious trial-and-error behavior in a spatial memory task and a visual discrimination task

Bett¹,

Allison²,

Murdoch³

et al. 2012

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Vicarious trial-and-errors (VTEs) are back-and-forth movements of the head exhibited by rodents and other animals when faced with a decision. These behaviors have recently been associated with prospective sweeps of hippocampal place cell firing, and thus may reflect a rodent model of deliberative decision-making. The aim of the current study was to test whether the hippocampus is essential for VTEs in a spatial memory task and in a simple visual discrimination (VD) task. We found that lesions of the hippocampus with ibotenic acid produced a significant impairment in the accuracy of choices in a serial spatial reversal (SR) task. In terms of VTEs, whereas sham-lesioned animals engaged in more VTE behavior prior to identifying the location of the reward as opposed to repeated trials after it had been located, the lesioned animals failed to show this difference. In contrast, damage to the hippocampus had no effect on acquisition of a VD or on the VTEs seen in this task. For both lesion and sham-lesion animals, adding an additional choice to the VD increased the number of VTEs and decreased the accuracy of choices. Together, these results suggest that the hippocampus may be specifically involved in VTE behavior during spatial decision making.

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An Animal Model of Decision Making: Vicarious Trial-and-Error in Tasks Requiring Memory for Visual Associations or Spatial Locations

Cited by 2 publications

References 15 publications

Hippocampus, delay discounting, and vicarious trial‐and‐error

Hippocampus, delay discounting, and vicarious trial‐and‐error

The neural substrates of deliberative decision making: contrasting effects of hippocampus lesions on performance and vicarious trial-and-error behavior in a spatial memory task and a visual discrimination task

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