Krause Martin, Schulze Wolfram, Schuster Stefan
Department of Animal Physiology, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany.
Elife. 2025 Jun 25;13:RP99634. doi: 10.7554/eLife.99634.
It is widely accepted that more time and information yield better decisions. However, some decisions manage to be extremely fast and yet accurate. The trick of such highspeed decisions appears to be the use of simplifying heuristics that works well for the most common condition but lacks flexibility otherwise. Here, we describe an unexpected level of flexibility in a complex highspeed decision that is made faster than an Olympic sprinter can respond to the start gun. In this decision, archerfish observe the initial speed, direction, and height of falling prey and then use these initial values to turn right towards where ballistically falling prey would later land. To analyze the limits in flexibility of this highspeed decision, we developed and critically tested a system that allowed us to replace the usual ballistic relation between initial prey motion and the expected landing point with another deterministic rule. We discovered that, surprisingly, adult fish could reprogram their highspeed decision to the new rule. Moreover, after reprogramming their decision fish were immediately able to generalize their decision to novel untrained settings, showing a remarkable degree of abstraction in how the decision circuit represented the novel rule. The decision circuit is even capable of simultaneously using two distinct sets of rules, one for each of two visually distinct objects. The flexibility and level of cognition are unexpected for a decision that lacks a speed-accuracy tradeoff and is made in less than 100 ms. Our findings demonstrate the enormous potential highspeed decision making can have and strongly suggest that we presently underappreciate this form of decision making.
人们普遍认为,有更多时间和信息能做出更好的决策。然而,有些决策既能极其迅速又能十分准确。这种高速决策的诀窍似乎在于使用了简化的启发式方法,这种方法在大多数常见情况下效果良好,但在其他情况下缺乏灵活性。在此,我们描述了一种复杂高速决策中意想不到的灵活性水平,这种决策比奥运会短跑运动员对发令枪响的反应还要快。在这个决策中,射水鱼观察下落猎物的初始速度、方向和高度,然后利用这些初始值转向弹道下落猎物稍后会着陆的位置。为了分析这种高速决策灵活性的限度,我们开发并严格测试了一个系统,该系统使我们能够用另一个确定性规则取代初始猎物运动与预期着陆点之间通常的弹道关系。我们惊讶地发现,成年鱼能够将它们的高速决策重新编程以适应新规则。此外,在重新编程决策后,鱼能够立即将其决策推广到新的未训练情境中,这表明决策回路在表示新规则时具有显著的抽象程度。决策回路甚至能够同时使用两组不同的规则,分别用于两个视觉上不同的物体。对于一个不存在速度 - 准确性权衡且在不到100毫秒内做出的决策来说,其灵活性和认知水平是意想不到的。我们的发现证明了高速决策具有的巨大潜力,并强烈表明我们目前对这种决策形式的认识不足。