[PDF] Vicarious trial and error | Semantic Scholar (2024)

Using new translational versions of a rodent foraging task and a human version lacking a navigation component, 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.

It was found that voxels within the visual cortices encoded neural representations of the available possibilities specifically following regret-inducing experiences, in which the subject had previously rejected a good offer only to encounter a low-valued offer on the subsequent trial.

It is demonstrated that head-scanning behaviors that humans typically exhibit during spatial navigation are as predictive of spatial learning as in the rat, and can be used to predict performance in navigation tasks with high accuracy.

It is shown that place-cells are able to represent the agents current location, whereas grid-cells encode the robots movement in space and project their activity over unexplored paths and the results suggest a tight interaction between spatial and reward related neuronal activity in defining VTE behavior.

The Movie and Candy Row are supported as translational tools to study decision-making during foraging in humans, providing convergent results with a rodent navigation task and demonstrating the potential to provide novel insights relevant to public health.

Overall, this work demonstrates the use of multiple measures that jointly assess relationships between learning, behavioral flexibility, and decision-making behaviors and validate these measures by showing that theta, beta, and gamma rhythms in the medial prefrontal cortex vary with respect to both observable and latent aspects of behavior.

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It is found that VTE events occurred during adjustment laps more often than during alternation laps, which is reminiscent of current navigational theories proposing a transition from a deliberative to a habitual decision-making mechanism.

These results illustrate that following a decision to act, neural ensembles in OFC represent reward, and upon the realization of an error, represent the reward that could have been.

Results suggest that the hippocampus may be specifically involved in VTE behavior during spatial decision making in a spatial memory task and in a simple visual discrimination task.

The nonspatial black-white discrimination learning and VTE behavior of the rat were investigated and male and female rats showed no significant differences in VTEbehavior or discrimination learning.

Even in a well-learned task, VTE was preferentially exhibited when a spatial selection was required, further linking VTE behavior with decision-making associated with hippocampal processing.

The results suggest that the decisiveness seen under clonidine is due to limited exploration of potential options in hippocampus, and suggest novel roles for noradrenaline as a modulator of the hippocampal search processes.

Young rats produced reliably more VTE behaviors, for protracted periods of time, uncoupled from behavioral flexibility, compared with young and adult rats.

The data suggest that the hippocampus does not represent space as a passive computation, but rather that hippocampal spatial processing is an active process likely regulated by cognitive mechanisms.

Ensembles of cells from OFC and vStr are recorded in rats engaged in the spatial adjusting delay-discounting task, supporting models in which vStr is directly involved in action selection, but OFC processes decision-related information afterwards that can be used to compare the predicted and actual consequences of behaviour.

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