Rats exhibit similar biases in foraging and intertemporal choice tasks
- Princeton University, United States
- Brown University, United States
- University of Arizona, United States
Abstract
Animals, including humans, consistently exhibit myopia in two different contexts: foraging, in which they harvest locally beyond what is predicted by optimal foraging theory, and intertemporal choice, in which they exhibit a preference for immediate vs. delayed rewards beyond what is predicted by rational (exponential) discounting. Despite the similarity in behavior between these two contexts, previous efforts to reconcile these observations in terms of a consistent pattern of time preferences have failed. Here, via extensive behavioral testing and quantitative modeling, we show that rats exhibit similar time preferences in both contexts: they prefer immediate vs. delayed rewards and they are sensitive to opportunity costs of delays to future decisions. Further, a quasi-hyperbolic discounting model, a form of hyperbolic discounting with separate components for short- and long-term rewards, explains individual rats' time preferences across both contexts, providing evidence for a common mechanism for myopic behavior in foraging and intertemporal choice.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
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Author details
Funding
National Institute of Mental Health (F31MH109286)
- Gary A Kane
- Jonathan D Cohen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All procedures were approved by the Princeton University (Protocol 1969) and Rutgers University (Protocol 14-075) Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees.
Copyright
© 2019, Kane et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Rats exhibit similar biases in foraging and intertemporal choice tasks
eLife 8:e48429.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48429
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