The determiners of behavior at a choice point.

Abstract

T h e question I am going to discuss is the very straightforward and specific one of "why rats turn the way they do, at a given choice-point in a given maze at a given stage of learning." The first item in the answer is fairly obvious. They turn the way they do because they have on the preceding trials met this same choicepoint together with such and such further objects or situations, down the one path and down the other, for such and such a number of preceding trials. Let me, however, analyze this further, with the aid of a couple of diagrams. First, consider a diagram of a single choice point (Figure 1). In this figure the point of choice itself is designated as 0,; the complex of stimulus-objects met going down the left alley, as O,, that met going down the right alley, as OR; the goal at the left, as 0,; and that at the right, as OcR. The behavior of turning to the left is represented by the arrow B,; and that of turning to the right, by the arrow B E .

Triple Dissociation of Information Processing in Dorsal Striatum, Ventral Striatum, and Hippocampus on a Learned Spatial Decision Task

“…Rats rapidly learned to choose the rewarded side, reaching asymptotic performance (>90%) within 10 laps (Figure 1c) with each group improving at a comparable rate (Figure S1a). Coincident with this rapid performance increase, rats exhibited pausing behavior at the high cost choice point (T4) during early laps, looking back and forth between left and right before making their choice (a hippocampus-dependent behavior known as vicarious trial and error or VTE, Tolman 1938; Hu and Amsel 1995). Pausing was absent at a control choice point (T2; Figures 1b and S1b).…”

How functionalist and process approaches to behavior can explain trait covariation.

“…Considered collectively, behaviors which an individual finds easy to perform and which are expected to result in effects the individual finds valuable can be understood as having higher functionality, utility, or expected value (Atkinson, 1957;Eccles & Wigfield, 2002;Feather, 1959;Gintis, 2007;Tolman, 1938). In turn, such behaviors should have greater motivational force (Vroom, 1964), and become the individual's behavioral intentions (Ajzen, 1991).…”

“…Several models suggest that a behavior's functionality to the actor can be understood as being established by the operation of three additional broad trait classes; see especially Ajzen (1991), Bandura (1977), Feather (1982), Gintis (2007), Heckhausen (1977), Tolman (1938), and Vroom (1964). Specifically, the functionality of a behavior to an actor can be understood as being established by (a) ability/efficacy traits, which concern the individual's expected ease of performing trait-identifying behaviors; (b) expectancy traits, which concern the expected outcomes of an individual's performance of such behaviors; and (c) valuation traits, which indicate the individual's expected valuation of particular outcomes.…”

The misbehaviour of a metacognitive monkey

“…The most apparent contrast lies in wavering; trials where the UR was utilized, regardless of difficulty, were characterized by high occurrences of pausing during response and movement back and forth between icons. Such behavior has long been considered a potential indicator of derived, cognitive processing (Tolman, 1927; Frith, 2012), although they also have been viewed more conservatively as manifestations of struggle or confusion which occur near perceptual thresholds (see Tolman, 1938; Smith et al, 1995; Couchman et al, 2012) and an implicit cue signaling a challenging problem, which encourages the seeking of additional information or alternative solutions (Carruthers, 2008). The results given here contrast with the latter interpretation, as incorrect trials, which almost invariably occurred on trials of high objective difficulty, were characterized by the lowest degrees of wavering.…”