Montague P Read, King-Casas Brooks
Department of Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry Unit, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2007 Dec;11(12):514-9. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.10.002. Epub 2007 Nov 26.
The mammalian brain is equipped with reward-harvesting mechanisms that efficiently categorize and value the behavioral choices that lead to rewards necessary for survival. In this context, 'efficiency' embodies the idea of achieving maximum returns for minimal energetic investments and places a premium on how an animal represents its available options. But the capacity to efficiently represent choices is a profoundly difficult problem because representations for behavioral choice depend intimately on the statistics of information arriving not just from the sensory world and but also from within the creature itself. Any complete account of decision-making in mammals must efficiently connect the internal needs to the perceptual apparatus available to a creature moment-to-moment.
哺乳动物的大脑具备奖励获取机制，该机制能有效地对行为选择进行分类和评估，这些行为选择会带来生存所需的奖励。在此背景下，“效率”体现了以最小的能量投入实现最大回报的理念，并重视动物如何呈现其可用选项。然而，有效呈现选择的能力是一个极其困难的问题，因为行为选择的呈现不仅紧密依赖于来自感官世界的信息统计，还依赖于来自生物自身内部的信息统计。对哺乳动物决策的任何完整解释都必须有效地将内部需求与生物每时每刻可用的感知器官联系起来。
