Rational inattention in mice

Abstract

Behavior exhibited by humans and other organisms is generally inconsistent and biased, and thus is often labeled irrational. However, the origins of this seemingly suboptimal behavior remain elusive. We developed a behavioral task and normative framework to reveal how organisms should allocate their limited processing resources such that there is an advantage to being imprecise and biased for a given metabolic investment that guarantees maximal utility. We found that mice act as rational-inattentive agents by adaptively allocating their sensory resources in a way that maximizes reward consumption in novel stimulus-reward association environments. Surprisingly, perception to commonly occurring stimuli was relatively imprecise, however this apparent statistical fallacy implies "awareness" and efficient adaptation to their neurocognitive limitations. Interestingly, distributional reinforcement learning mechanisms efficiently regulate sensory precision via top-down normalization. These findings establish a neurobehavioral foundation for how organisms efficiently perceive and adapt to environmental states of the world within the constraints imposed by neurobiology.

Distributed context-dependent choice information in mouse posterior cortex

“…Another contributing factor to the identification of choice signals could have been task complexity. In our task, mice were asked to make a relative comparison between stimulus orientations, a difficult task even for primates 17,59 , whereas other studies used simpler visual detection 27 or contrast discrimination tasks 25 . More complex perceptual decisions engage more spatially distributed networks; 60 therefore, the complexity of our task might have facilitated the emergence of choice signals in these posterior cortical regions.…”

Distributed context-dependent choice information in mouse posterior cortex

“…Another contributing factor could have been task complexity. In our task, mice were asked to make a relative comparison between stimulus orientations, a difficult task even for primates 63,85 , whereas other studies used simpler visual detection 26 or contrast discrimination tasks 54 .…”