Curiosity is a basic element of our cognition, but its biological function, mechanisms, and neural underpinning remain poorly understood. It is nonetheless a motivator for learning, influential in ...decision-making, and crucial for healthy development. One factor limiting our understanding of it is the lack of a widely agreed upon delineation of what is and is not curiosity. Another factor is the dearth of standardized laboratory tasks that manipulate curiosity in the lab. Despite these barriers, recent years have seen a major growth of interest in both the neuroscience and psychology of curiosity. In this Perspective, we advocate for the importance of the field, provide a selective overview of its current state, and describe tasks that are used to study curiosity and information-seeking. We propose that, rather than worry about defining curiosity, it is more helpful to consider the motivations for information-seeking behavior and to study it in its ethological context.
Kidd and Hayden summarize the current state of research into curiosity and propose that, rather than focusing on definitions and taxonomy, it is more useful to take a functional perspective, such as that offered by Tinbergen’s four questions.
The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) has attracted great interest from neuroscientists because it is associated with so many important cognitive functions. Despite, or perhaps because of, its ...rich functional repertoire, we lack a single comprehensive view of its function. Most research has approached this puzzle from the top down, using aggregate measures such as neuroimaging. We provide a view from the bottom up, with a focus on single-unit responses and anatomy. We summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the three major approaches to characterizing the dACC: as a monitor, as a controller, and as an economic structure. We argue that neurons in the dACC are specialized for representing contexts, or task-state variables relevant for behavior, and strategies, or aspects of future plans. We propose that dACC neurons link contexts with strategies by integrating diverse task-relevant information to create a rich representation of task space and exert high-level and abstract control over decision and action.
Decision makers are curious and consequently value advance information about future events. We made use of this fact to test competing theories of value representation in area 13 of orbitofrontal ...cortex (OFC). In a new task, we found that monkeys reliably sacrificed primary reward (water) to view advance information about gamble outcomes. While monkeys integrated information value with primary reward value to make their decisions, OFC neurons had no systematic tendency to integrate these variables, instead encoding them in orthogonal manners. These results suggest that the predominant role of the OFC is to encode variables relevant for learning, attention, and decision making, rather than integrating them into a single scale of value. They also suggest that OFC may be placed at a relatively early stage in the hierarchy of information-seeking decisions, before evaluation is complete. Thus, our results delineate a circuit for information-seeking decisions and suggest a neural basis for curiosity.
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•Monkeys sacrifice water reward for advance information about gamble outcomes•OFC neurons signal both water amount and informativeness of a gamble•OFC neurons do not tend to integrate these variables to code subjective value•OFC neurons respond differently to water rewards and cues predicting those rewards
Blanchard et al. find that monkeys are curious, willing to sacrifice some water for advance information about gamble outcomes. OFC neurons signal water amount and informativeness of gambles, but do not tend to integrate these variables into a common currency.
Recent theories suggest that reward-based choice reflects competition between value signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). We tested this idea by recording vmPFC neurons while ...macaques performed a gambling task with asynchronous offer presentation. We found that neuronal activity shows four patterns consistent with selection via mutual inhibition: (1) correlated tuning for probability and reward size, suggesting that vmPFC carries an integrated value signal; (2) anti-correlated tuning curves for the two options, suggesting mutual inhibition; (3) neurons rapidly come to signal the value of the chosen offer, suggesting the circuit serves to produce a choice; and (4) after regressing out the effects of option values, firing rates still could predict choice—a choice probability signal. In addition, neurons signaled gamble outcomes, suggesting that vmPFC contributes to both monitoring and choice processes. These data suggest a possible mechanism for reward-based choice and endorse the centrality of vmPFC in that process.
•vmPFC neurons signal gamble probability and reward size in a common currency format•vmPFC neurons antagonistically signal values of competing offers•vmPFC neurons signal chosen values and not unchosen values•Residual variability in vmPFC firing immediately before selection predicts choices
Strait et al. show that during reward-based choice, vmPFC neurons signal gamble probability and reward size in a common currency format and antagonistically signal values of competing offers, consistent with value comparison through mutual inhibition between reward representations.
Many accounts of reward-based choice argue for distinct component processes that are serial and functionally localized. In this Opinion article, we argue for an alternative viewpoint, in which ...choices emerge from repeated computations that are distributed across many brain regions. We emphasize how several features of neuroanatomy may support the implementation of choice, including mutual inhibition in recurrent neural networks and the hierarchical organization of timescales for information processing across the cortex. This account also suggests that certain correlates of value are emergent rather than represented explicitly in the brain.
Animals are an important model for studies of impulsivity and self-control. Many studies have made use of the
intertemporal choice task
, which pits small rewards available sooner against larger ...rewards available later (typically several seconds), repeated over many trials. Preference for the sooner reward is often taken to indicate impulsivity and/or a failure of self-control. This review shows that very little evidence supports this assumption; on the contrary, ostensible discounting behavior may reflect a boundedly rational but not necessarily impulsive reward-maximizing strategy. Specifically, animals may discount weakly, or even adopt a long-term rate-maximizing strategy, but fail to fully incorporate postreward delays into their choices. This failure may reflect learning biases. Consequently, tasks that measure animal discounting may greatly overestimate the true discounting and may be confounded by processes unrelated to time preferences. If so, animals may be much more patient than is widely believed; human and animal intertemporal choices may reflect unrelated mental operations; and the shared hyperbolic shape of the human and animal discount curves, which is used to justify cross-species comparisons, may be coincidental. The discussion concludes with a consideration of alternative ways to measure self-control in animals.
Neuroscience needs evolution Cisek, Paul; Hayden, Benjamin Y
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences,
02/2022, Letnik:
377, Številka:
1844
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The nervous system is a product of evolution. That is, it was constructed through a long series of modifications, within the strong constraints of heredity, and continuously subjected to intense ...selection pressures. As a result, the organization and functions of the brain are shaped by its history. We believe that this fact, underappreciated in contemporary systems neuroscience, offers an invaluable aid for helping us resolve the brain's mysteries. Indeed, we think that the consideration of evolutionary history ought to take its place alongside other intellectual tools used to understand the brain, such as behavioural experiments, studies of anatomical structure and functional characterization based on recordings of neural activity. In this introduction, we argue for the importance of evolution by highlighting specific examples of ways that evolutionary theory can enhance neuroscience. The rest of the theme issue elaborates this point, emphasizing the conservative nature of neural evolution, the important consequences of specific transitions that occurred in our history, and the ways in which considerations of evolution can shed light on issues ranging from specific mechanisms to fundamental principles of brain organization. This article is part of the theme issue 'Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory'.
We hypothesized that during binary economic choice, decision makers use the first option they attend as a default to which they compare the second. To test this idea, we recorded activity of neurons ...in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) of macaques choosing between gambles presented asynchronously. We find that ensemble encoding of the value of the first offer includes both choice-dependent and choice-independent aspects, as if reflecting a partial decision. That is, its responses are neither entirely pre- nor post-decisional. In contrast, coding of the value of the second offer is entirely decision dependent (i.e., post-decisional). This result holds even when offer-value encodings are compared within the same time period. Additionally, we see no evidence for 2 pools of neurons linked to the 2 offers; instead, all comparison appears to occur within a single functionally homogenous pool of task-selective neurons. These observations suggest that economic choices reflect a context-dependent evaluation of attended options. Moreover, they raise the possibility that value representations reflect, to some extent, a tentative commitment to a choice.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
A major shift is happening within neurophysiology: a population doctrine is drawing level with the single-neuron doctrine that has long dominated the field. Population-level ideas have so far had ...their greatest impact in motor neuroscience, but they hold great promise for resolving open questions in cognition as well. Here, we codify the population doctrine and survey recent work that leverages this view to specifically probe cognition. Our discussion is organized around five core concepts that provide a foundation for population-level thinking: (1) state spaces, (2) manifolds, (3) coding dimensions, (4) subspaces, and (5) dynamics. The work we review illustrates the progress and promise that population-level thinking holds for cognitive neuroscience—for delivering new insight into attention, working memory, decision-making, executive function, learning, and reward processing.
The population doctrine holds that the fundamental computational unit of the brain is the population. This view holds great promise for resolving open questions in cognition. Ebitz and Hayden discuss five core concepts of population analysis and review relevant papers.
The rhesus macaque is an important model species in several branches of science, including neuroscience, psychology, ethology, and medicine. The utility of the macaque model would be greatly enhanced ...by the ability to precisely measure behavior in freely moving conditions. Existing approaches do not provide sufficient tracking. Here, we describe OpenMonkeyStudio, a deep learning-based markerless motion capture system for estimating 3D pose in freely moving macaques in large unconstrained environments. Our system makes use of 62 machine vision cameras that encircle an open 2.45 m × 2.45 m × 2.75 m enclosure. The resulting multiview image streams allow for data augmentation via 3D-reconstruction of annotated images to train a robust view-invariant deep neural network. This view invariance represents an important advance over previous markerless 2D tracking approaches, and allows fully automatic pose inference on unconstrained natural motion. We show that OpenMonkeyStudio can be used to accurately recognize actions and track social interactions.
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