Rats shown to feel regret over bad decisions

By Zoe GoughReporter, BBC Nature

Rats experience regret when their actions make them miss out on better food options, a study has found.

It is the first time regret has been identified in mammals other than humans.

Researchers created situations where rats had to choose whether to wait a set amount of time for a food reward, or move onto another one.

Those that moved on and found the next offering was even worse showed regretful behaviour.

The study was conducted by neuroscientists based at the University of Minnesota, US; their findings are reported in Nature Neuroscience.

It suggests thoughts similar to regret can affect the future decisions rodents make and dispels the belief that regret is unique to humans.

Prof David Redish, from the US-based research team, said it was important to differentiate regret from disappointment.

"Regret is the recognition that you made a mistake, that if you had done something else, you would have been better off," he said.

"The hard part was that we had to separate disappointment, which is just when things aren't as good as you hoped. The key was letting the rats choose."

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Flies pause while 200 neurons help with tough decisions

By Jonathan WebbScience reporter, BBC News

Just like us, fruit flies dwell on difficult decisions, according to a study published in the journal Science.

They spend more time choosing between a strong and a weak smell if the difference is small.

The research links this deliberation to a particular gene, FoxP, and the activity of fewer than 200 neurons.

Mutations in FoxP, also associated with cognition and language in humans, made flies' decisions even slower without affecting which choice they made.

Gathering information before committing to a decision is a hallmark of intelligence. If the information is unclear, the choice is trickier and the decision takes more time.

We do it, other primates do it, even rats and mice do it - but now it seems that flies do too.

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Brain Mapping Reveals Neurological Basis of Decision-Making in Rats

Mar. 20, 2013 — Scientists at UC San Francisco have discovered how memory recall is linked to decision-making in rats, showing that measurable activity in one part of the brain occurs when rats in a maze are playing out memories that help them decide which way to turn. The more they play out these memories, the more likely they are to find their way correctly to the end of the maze.

In their study, reported this week in the journal Neuron, the UCSF researchers implanted electrodes directly on a region of the rat brain known as the hippocampus, which is already known to play a key role in the formation and recall of memory. This same region is active when animals are learning, and it is damaged in people who have Alzheimer's and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The study showed that when the rats paused before an upcoming choice, sometimes the hippocampus was more active and sometimes it was less active. When it was more active it did a better job of recalling memories of places the animal could go next, and the animal was more likely to go to the right place.

"We know that considering possibilities is important for decision-making, but we haven't really known how this happens in the brain," said neuroscientist Loren Frank, PhD, who led the research. Frank is an associate professor of physiology and a member of the UCSF Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF.

Continued: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130320155232.htm

When Ants Get Together to Make a Decision

(ISNS) -- When ants are confronted with information overload and face too many decisions -- about where to live, for instance -- they revert to the wisdom of the crowd.

Despite having a brain smaller than the point of a pin, one ant species uses an elaborate system of sending out scouts to look for new homes. The scouts report back, and then the whole colony votes, according to researchers at Arizona State University.

The ants use chemistry and crowdsourcing, wrote associate professor of biology Stephen C. Pratt and graduate student Takao Sasaki at Arizona State University, in the current issue of Current Biology.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/24568-when-ants-get-together-to-make-a-decision.html

Head Butts & Waggle Dances: How Honeybees Make Decisions

Honeybees choose new nest sites by essentially head-butting each other into a consensus, shows a new study.

When scout bees find a new potential home, they do a waggle dance to broadcast to other scout bees where the nest is and how suitable it is for the swarm. The nest with the most support in the end becomes the swarm’s new home.

But new research shows another layer of complexity to the decision-making process: The bees deliver "stop signals" via head butts to scouts favoring a different site. With enough head butts, a scout bee will stop its dance, decreasing the apparent support for that particular nest.

This process of excitation (waggle dances) and inhibition (head butts) in the bee swarm parallels how a complex brain makes decisions using neurons, the researchers say.


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