Vicarious Trial-and-Error Is Enhanced During Deliberation in Human Virtual Navigation in a Translational Foraging Task.

Thach Huynh,Neil Schmitzer-Torbert,Keanan Alstatt,Samantha V Abram

doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2021.586159

Abstract

Foraging tasks provide valuable insights into decision-making as animals decide how to allocate limited resources (such as time). In rodents, vicarious trial-and-error (back and forth movements), or VTE, is an important behavioral measure of deliberation which is enhanced early in learning and when animals are presented with difficult decisions. Using new translational versions of a rodent foraging task (the “Movie Row” and “Candy Row”), humans navigated a virtual maze presented on standard computers to obtain rewards (either short videos or candy) offered after a variable delay. Decision latencies were longer when participants were presented with difficult offers, overrode their preferences, and when they accepted an offer after rejecting a previous offer. In these situations, humans showed VTE-like behavior, where they were more likely to pause and/or reorient one or more times before making a decision. Behavior on these tasks replicated previous results from the rodent foraging task (“Restaurant Row”) and a human version lacking a navigation component (“Web-Surf”) and revealed some species differences. Compared to survey measures of delay-discounting, willingness to wait for rewards in the foraging task was not related to willingness to wait for hypothetical rewards. And, smoking status (use of cigarettes or e-cigarettes) was associated with stronger discounting of hypothetical future rewards, but was not well-related to performance on the foraging tasks. In contrast, individuals with overweight or obese BMI (≥25) did not show stronger delay-discounting, but individuals with BMI ≥ 25, and especially females, showed reduced sensitivity to sunk-costs (where their decisions were less sensitive to irrecoverable investments of effort) and less deliberation when presented with difficult offers. These data indicate that VTE is a behavioral index of deliberation in humans, and further support the Movie and Candy Row as translational tools to study decision-making in humans with the potential to provide novel insights about decision-making that are relevant to public health.

Highlights

Decision-making is a key capability, and in some sense a fundamental goal of the nervous system
To determine if VTE-like behaviors are associated with deliberation in human virtual navigation, we developed two virtual navigation versions of Restaurant Row
When behavior was analyzed by post-task rankings for each reward type, there were strong relationships between rank and other measures of stated preference and the participants’ revealed preferences

Summary

Introduction

Decision-making is a key capability, and in some sense a fundamental goal of the nervous system. Rather than a unitary construct, decisions rely on differentiable brain systems, each with a separate computational goal (Redish, 2013). In the Restaurant Row task, rodents forage on a square track, navigating between sites that deliver different flavors of food rewards that are available after a variable delay. Performance on the task has been used to study the differential impact of addictive drug exposure on decision-making. Long-term withdrawal from cocaine and heroin in mice produces dissociable effects on Restaurant Row performance (Sweis et al, 2018a): cocaine-abstinent mice show changes in deliberation, assessed by levels of VTE, while morphine-abstinent mice show a reduced willingness to quit after initially accepting an offer

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Conclusion