Much research has been dedicated to understanding the psychological and neural bases of goal-directed action. Yet, the relationship between context and goal-directed action is not well understood. Here, we used excitotoxic lesions, chemogenetics, and circuit-specific manipulations to demonstrate a role for ventral hippocampus (vHPC) in the contextu...
The basal ganglia (BG) make up a prominent nexus between visual and motor-related brain regions. In contrast to the BG's well-established roles in movement control and value-based decision making, their contributions to the transformation of visual input into an action remain unclear, especially in the context of perceptual decisions based on uncer...
Adaptive behaviour often necessitates that animals learn about events in a manner that is specific to a particular context or environment. These hierarchical organisations allow the animal to decide which action is the most appropriate when faced with ambiguous or conflicting possibilities. This study examined the role of hippocampus in enabling an...
Behavior-related neuronal signals often vary between neurons, which might reflect the unreliability of individual neurons or a truly heterogeneous code. This notion may also apply to economic ("value-based") choices and the underlying reward signals. Reward value is subjective and can be described by a nonlinearly weighted magnitude (utility) and p...
Published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science
The ways in which humans can support good welfare for animals in their care is an ongoing subject of debate: some place emphasis on the animals’ physical health; others, on animals’ ability to live “natural lives”; and others on animals’ affective states or psychological wellbeing. Recently, there has been an increase in interest in how an animal’s...
Destination choice models are a key component of any transport and land-use model. Applications in agent-based models allow for destination choice on an individual level including personal variables, like trip purpose, or situational variables. Commonly applied methodologies stem from econometrics, discrete choice theory and utility maximization us...
Published in Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Behavioral interventions for animals typically require the inclusion of programmed reinforcers. Although pet owners and human caregivers can often identify items that the animal will consume, preference assessments can more accurately determine relative preference rankings between various stimuli, which is important given that higher preferred item...
Eating behavior is influenced by automatic responses to contextual food cues 1. For example, the easy availability of tasty foods can stimulate eating behaviors by enhancing the reward experience. Such working hypothesis is supported by a previous study demonstrated that providing choice resulted in higher levels of both food liking and food intake...
All life must solve how to allocate limited energy resources to maximize benefits from scarce opportunities. Economic theory posits decision makers optimize choice by maximizing the subjective benefit (utility) of reward minus the subjective cost (disutility) of the required effort. While successful in many settings, this model does not fully accou...
Turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) is a promising new model species used in biomedical and ecological laboratory experiments, and should be kept under optimal conditions to ensure fish welfare and the quality of science. While the popularity of this model species is rapidly increasing, we need to improve our understanding of how the speci...
