Pittaras Elsa, Rabat Arnaud, Granon Sylvie
Biology Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020, USA.
Unité Fatigue et Vigilance, Département Environnements Opérationnels, Institut de Recherche Biomédicale des armées, 1 place du Général Valérie ANDRE, BP 73, 91223 Bretigny-sur-Orge cedex, France.
Bio Protoc. 2020 Jan 5;10(1):e3479. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3479.
Decision-making is a complex cognitive process which consists of choosing one option among several alternatives. In humans, this process is featured in the Iowa gambling task (IGT), a decision-making task that mimics real life situations by reproducing uncertain conditions based on probabilistic rewards or penalties (see Background). Several authors wanted to adapt the IGT in rodents with subtle differences in protocols that match various aspects of the human task. Here we propose, for the first time in mice, a protocol that contains the most important characteristics of the IGT: 4 different options, choices based on 4 ambiguous outcomes with immediate and long term rewards, a total of 100 trials, no learning of the contingency before the task, and presence of both a certain reward and a probable penalty. During this task, mice have to choose between options more or less advantageous in the short and long term by developing a decision-making strategy that differs between individuals. Therefore, the strength of this protocol is that it is one of the first to enable the study of decision-making in a complex situation, and demonstrates inter-individual differences regarding decision-making strategies in mice.
决策是一个复杂的认知过程，它包括在几个备选方案中选择一个选项。在人类中，这个过程在爱荷华赌博任务（IGT）中有所体现，这是一种决策任务，通过基于概率奖励或惩罚再现不确定条件来模拟现实生活情况（见背景）。几位作者希望将IGT应用于啮齿动物，在实验方案上有细微差异，以匹配人类任务的各个方面。在这里，我们首次在小鼠中提出了一种包含IGT最重要特征的实验方案：4种不同的选项，基于4种模糊结果的选择，有即时和长期奖励，总共100次试验，在任务前不学习偶然性，并且既有确定的奖励又有可能的惩罚。在这个任务中，小鼠必须通过制定个体间不同的决策策略，在短期和长期内选择或多或少有利的选项。因此，这个实验方案的优势在于，它是最早能够在复杂情况下研究决策的方案之一，并证明了小鼠在决策策略方面存在个体差异。
