Garcia Marissa, Gupta Sukriti, Wikenheiser Andrew M
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095.
Current address: Neurosciences Graduate Program, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA 92093.
bioRxiv. 2023 Oct 9:2023.02.19.529135. doi: 10.1101/2023.02.19.529135.
The ubiquity, importance, and sophistication of foraging behavior makes it an ideal platform for studying naturalistic decision making in animals. We developed a spatial patch-foraging task for rats, in which subjects chose how long to remain in one foraging patch as the rate of food earnings steadily decreased. The cost of seeking out a new location was varied across sessions. The behavioral task was designed to mimic the structure of natural foraging problems, where distinct spatial locations are associated with different reward statistics, and decisions require navigation and movement through space. Male and female Long-Evans rats generally followed the predictions of theoretical models of foraging, albeit with a consistent tendency to persist with patches for too long compared to behavioral strategies that maximize food intake rate. The tendency to choose overly-long patch residence times was stronger in male rats. We also observed sex differences in locomotion as rats performed the task, but these differences in movement only partially accounted for the differences in patch residence durations observed between male and female rats. Together, these results suggest a nuanced relationship between movement, sex, and foraging decisions.
觅食行为的普遍性、重要性和复杂性使其成为研究动物自然决策的理想平台。我们为大鼠开发了一种空间斑块觅食任务，在该任务中，随着食物获取率稳步下降，实验对象要选择在一个觅食斑块中停留多长时间。寻找新地点的成本在不同实验环节有所变化。该行为任务旨在模拟自然觅食问题的结构，即不同的空间位置与不同的奖励统计数据相关联，并且决策需要在空间中导航和移动。雄性和雌性朗-埃文斯大鼠总体上遵循觅食理论模型的预测，尽管与最大化食物摄入率的行为策略相比，它们有持续在斑块中停留过长时间的一致倾向。雄性大鼠选择过长斑块停留时间的倾向更强。在大鼠执行任务时，我们还观察到了运动方面的性别差异，但这些运动差异仅部分解释了雄性和雌性大鼠之间观察到的斑块停留时间差异。总之，这些结果表明运动、性别和觅食决策之间存在微妙的关系。
