Sequential Temporal Discrimination in Humans and Mice

Filiz Çoşkun,Dilara Berkay,Fuat Balcı,Zeynep Ceyda Sayalı

doi:10.46867/ijcp.2015.28.02.08

Filiz Çoşkun, Dilara Berkay + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.46867/ijcp.2015.28.02.08

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Abstract

Previous studies showed that humans and mice can maximize their rewards in two alternative temporal discrimination tasks by incorporating exogenous probabilities and endogenous timing uncertainty into their decisions. The current study investigated if the probabilistic relations modulated the temporal discrimination performance in scenarios with more than two temporal options. In order to address this question, we tested humans (Experiment 1) and mice (Experiment 2) in the dual-switch task, which required subjects to discriminate three time intervals (short, medium, and long durations) in a sequential fashion. The latencies of switches from short to medium and from medium to long option were the main units of analysis. The results revealed that the timing of switches between the first two options (short-to-medium) were sensitive to probabilistic information in both humans and mice. However, mice but not humans adapted the timing of their subsequent switches between the last two options (medium-to-long) based on the probabilistic information associated with these latter options. These results point at a suboptimal tendency in the temporal decisions of humans with multiple options.

Highlights

Previous studies showed that humans and mice can maximize their rewards in two alternative temporal discrimination tasks by incorporating exogenous probabilities and endogenous timing uncertainty into their decisions
The current study investigated whether the probabilistic relations modulated the temporal discrimination performance in scenarios with more than two temporal options
In order to test the generalizability of the effect of probabilistic information on temporal decision-making and evaluate the resultant decision outputs with respect to optimality in more complex temporal decision-making scenarios, the current study investigated the temporal discrimination performance of humans and mice with more than two temporal options

Summary

Introduction

Previous studies showed that humans and mice can maximize their rewards in two alternative temporal discrimination tasks by incorporating exogenous probabilities and endogenous timing uncertainty into their decisions. Several studies that used variants of temporal discrimination procedures have manipulated the probability of different reference durations and demonstrated that humans and mice can adaptively incorporate stimulus probabilities into their timebased decisions These decisions nearly maximized the reward attained, which entailed the integration of probabilistic contingencies and the level of decisionmakers’ endogenous (representational) timing uncertainty into the decision outputs in a normative fashion. Recent studies with humans and mice (Akdoğan & Balcı, 2015; Çoşkun et al, 2015) have pointed at the same results in the temporal bisection task, where the categorization response is emitted after, rather than during the timed interval These findings, along with others, point at the optimal temporal risk assessment performance of humans and other animals in scenarios with one or two probabilistic options associated with supra-second delays (for review see Balcı et al, 2011). Note that the timing of motor endpoints was a determinant of the overall gain in all of these experimental scenarios, the latter of which required a sequence of movements

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