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1. A special role for Anterior Cingulate Cortex, but not Orbitofrontal Cortex or Basolateral Amygdala, in choices involving information

   González, V. V. (January 2023, bioRxiv)

   Humans and other animals make decisions under uncertainty. Choosing an option that provides information can improve decision making. However, subjects often choose information that does not increase the chances of obtaining reward. In a procedure that promotes such paradoxical choice, animals choose between two alternatives: The richer option is followed by a cue that is rewarded 50% of the time (No-info) and the leaner option is followed by one of two cues, one always rewarded (100%), and the other never rewarded, 0% (Info). Since decisions involve comparing the subjective value of options after integrating all their features perhaps including information value, preference for information may rely on cortico-amygdalar circuitry. To test this, male and female Long-Evans rats were prepared with bilateral inhibitory DREADDs in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), basolateral amygdala (BLA), or null virus infusions as a control. Using a counterbalanced design, we inhibited these regions after stable preference was acquired and during learning of new Info and No-info cues. We found that inhibition of ACC, but not OFC or BLA, selectively destabilized choice preference in female rats without affecting latency to choose or the response rate to cues. A logistic regression fit revealed that the previous choice strongly predicted preference in control animals, but not in female rats following ACC inhibition. BLA inhibition tended to decrease the learning of new cues that signaled the Info option, but had no effect on preference. The results reveal a causal, sex-dependent role for ACC in decisions involving information. 

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2. Pigeons (Columba livia) distinguish between absence of events and lack of evidence in contingency learning

   Long, Aida; Blaisdell, Aaron P. (October 2023, International Journal of Comparative Psychology)

   When information about an event is perceptually occluded, individuals might recognize that the event may be present but that they cannot detect it because of the occluder. In such situations, an individual should continue to believe that the prevailing contingencies have not changed. This is in stark contrast to conditions where an expected event is explicitly absent, which should lead the individual to update their contingency knowledge. In an autoshaping procedure, we tested whether pigeons can discriminate conditions of perceptual ambiguity from perceptual certainty. Pigeons first learned to peck at two Pavlovian visual cues, followed by extinction of one of the cues. During extinction, the feeder was occluded by a metal shield for pigeons in Group Occluded, while the metal shield was placed next to but not covering the feeder for pigeons in Group Un-Occluded. On a final test with the metal shield removed, pigeons in Group Un-occluded pecked less at the extinguished cue than at the un-extinguished cue; while pigeons in Group Occluded pecked at an equally high rate to both cues. These results replicate in pigeons with similar results reported in rats by Waldmann et al. (2012) and show that pigeons are able to discriminate conditions of certainty from conditions of ambiguity. 

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3. Labels, Even Arbitrary Ones, Facilitate Categorization

   Altenhof, A.; Roberts, G. (January 2021, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43)

   Labels may play a role in the formation and acquisition of ob- ject categories. We investigated this using a free-categorization task, manipulating the presence or absence of labels and whether labels were random or reinforced one of two alterna- tive categorization cues (taxonomic or thematic relationships). When labels were absent, participants used thematic and taxo- nomic cues equally to categorize stimuli. When present, labels were used as the primary cue for category formation, with ran- dom labels leading participants to attend less to taxonomic and thematic relations between stimuli. When labels redundantly reinforced either thematic or taxonomic cues, the use of the cue in question was boosted along with the use of labels as a cue for categorization. Most interestingly, in spite of pre- viously observed associations between labels and taxonomic grouping, labels did not preferentially boost the use of either taxonomic or thematic cues in comparison with the other. 

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4. Individual Differences in Categorization Gradience As Predicted by Online Processing of Phonetic Cues During Spoken Word Recognition: Evidence From Eye Movements

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12948  

   Ou, Jinghua; Yu, Alan C. L.; Xiang, Ming (March 2021, Cognitive Science)

   Abstract Recent studies have documented substantial variability among typical listeners in how gradiently they categorize speech sounds, and this variability in categorization gradience may link to how listeners weight different cues in the incoming signal. The present study tested the relationship between categorization gradience and cue weighting across two sets of English contrasts, each varying orthogonally in two acoustic dimensions. Participants performed a four‐alternative forced‐choice identification task in a visual world paradigm while their eye movements were monitored. We found that (a) greater categorization gradience derived from behavioral identification responses corresponds to larger secondary cue weights derived from eye movements; (b) the relationship between categorization gradience and secondary cue weighting is observed across cues and contrasts, suggesting that categorization gradience may be a consistent within‐individual property in speech perception; and (c) listeners who showed greater categorization gradience tend to adopt a buffered processing strategy, especially when cues arrive asynchronously in time. 

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5. Revealed strength of preference: Inference from response times

   Konovalov, Arkady; Krajbich, Ian. (July 2019, Judgment and decision making)

   null (Ed.)

   Revealed preference is the dominant approach for inferring preferences, but it is limited in that it relies solely on discrete choice data. When a person chooses one alternative over another, we cannot infer the strength of their preference or predict how likely they will be to make the same choice again. However, the choice process also produces response times (RTs), which are continuous and easily observable. It has been shown that RTs often decrease with strength-of-preference. This is a basic property of sequential sampling models such as the drift diffusion model. What remains unclear is whether this relationship is sufficiently strong, relative to the other factors that affect RTs, to allow us to reliably infer strength-of-preference across individuals. Using several experiments, we show that even when every subject chooses the same alternative, we can still rank them based on their RTs and predict their behavior on other choice problems. We can also use RTs to predict whether a subject will repeat or reverse their decision when presented with the same choice problem a second time. Finally, as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that it is also possible to recover individual preference parameters from RTs alone. These results demonstrate that it is indeed possible to use RTs to infer preferences. 

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