Abstract
Humans and non-human animals frequently violate principles of economic rationality, such as transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and regularity. The conditions that lead to these violations are not completely understood. Here we report a study on mice tested in automated home-cage setups using rewards of drinking water. Rewards differed in one of two dimensions, volume or probability. Our results suggest that mouse choice conforms to the principles of economic rationality for options that differ along a single reward dimension. A psychometric analysis of mouse choices further revealed that mice responded more strongly to differences in probability than to differences in volume, despite equivalence in return rates. This study also demonstrates the synergistic effect between the principles of economic rationality and psychophysics in making quantitative predictions about choices of healthy laboratory mice. This opens up new possibilities for the analyses of multi-dimensional choice and the use of mice with cognitive impairments that may violate economic rationality.
Highlights
Making profitable decisions is crucial for quality of life and survival[1]
Economic rationality is mathematically defined in terms of principles such as transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), and regularity, which guarantee an internal consistency of choice[10,11,12]
The principle of IIA states that the relative preference for any option in an existing choice set should not change when the choice set is increased by the addition of a new option
Summary
Humans and non-human animals frequently violate principles of economic rationality, such as transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and regularity. In the ‘volume first’ group, after the end of the probability discrimination experiment, six binary volume discrimination conditions with corresponding reversals were repeated, including a final AD0 condition that was given for two sessions (the second session was a reversal) In this forced dispenser sharing condition, all mice had the same two low-profitability dispensers (spatial positions 1 and 3), and for half of these mice dispenser 1 had a high profitability and dispenser 3 had a medium profitability, whereas for the other half the dispenser profitabilities were spatially inverted (Fig. 2C). Generalized linear mixed models (MCMCglmm package in R) were used to test whether sampling rate was affected by experimental group (volume first or probability first), reward dimension (volume or probability), relative intensity, and profitability of the irrelevant options (all four variables entered as fixed effects), with mouse as random effect.
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