Abstract
Foraging tasks can provide valuable insights into decision-making, as animals choose how to allocate limited resources (such as time). In the “Restaurant Row” task, rodents move between several sites to obtain food rewards available after a variable delay, while in a translational version (the “Web-Surf”) lacking the navigation component, humans are offered short videos. Both tasks have provided novel insights into decision-making and have been applied to addiction vulnerability and the impact of drug exposure on decision-making. We tested new tasks (the “Movie Row” and “Candy Row”) which use virtual navigation to determine if the behavioral correlates of human decision-making are more broadly similar to those of rodents, and explored the relationship of task performance to smoking and obesity. Humans navigated a virtual maze presented on standard computers to obtain rewards (either short videos or candy) available after a variable delay. Behavior on the tasks replicated previous results for the Restaurant Row and Web-Surf. In conditions promoting deliberation, decision latency was elevated along with measures of vicarious trial-and-error (VTE), supporting VTE as a shared behavioral index of deliberation across species. Smoking status was not well-related to performance, while high BMI (> 25) individuals showed reduced sensitivity to a sunk-costs measure and stronger sensitivity to offer value for offers below the preferred delay. These data support the Movie and Candy Row 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.
Footnotes
Author Note: Thach Huynh, Psychology, Wabash College; Keanan Alstatt, Psychology, Wabash College; Samantha Abram, Sierra Pacific Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Centers, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and the University of California, San Francisco, CA, Mental Health Service, Veterans Affairs San Francisco Healthcare System, San Francisco, CA, Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Neil Schmitzer-Torbert, Psychology, Wabash College.
S.V. Abram is supported by the Department of Veteran Affairs Sierra Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC).
The authors would like to thank Dr. Aoife O’Donovan for providing the second set of videos used (puppies, social, food and a second set of landscape) and for comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank John Michael Trebing for his assistance with the experiments reported here.
