1. Neuroscience

Monkey plays Pac-Man with compositional strategies and hierarchical decision-making

  1. Qianli Yang
  2. Zhongqiao Lin
  3. Wenyi Zhang
  4. Jianshu Li
  5. Xiyuan Chen
  6. Jiaqi Zhang
  7. Tianming Yang  Is a corresponding author
  1. Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
  2. Brown University, United States
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74500
Share this article
Cite this article
  1. Qianli Yang
  2. Zhongqiao Lin
  3. Wenyi Zhang
  4. Jianshu Li
  5. Xiyuan Chen
  6. Jiaqi Zhang
  7. Tianming Yang
(2022)
Monkey plays Pac-Man with compositional strategies and hierarchical decision-making
eLife 11:e74500.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74500
  2. Download BibTeX
  3. Download .RIS

Abstract

Humans can often handle daunting tasks with ease by developing a set of strategies to reduce decision making into simpler problems. The ability to use heuristic strategies demands an advanced level of intelligence and has not been demonstrated in animals. Here, we trained macaque monkeys to play the classic video game Pac-Man. The monkeys' decision-making may be described with a strategy-based hierarchical decision-making model with over 90% accuracy. The model reveals that the monkeys adopted the take-the-best heuristic by using one dominating strategy for their decision-making at a time and formed compound strategies by assembling the basis strategies to handle particular game situations. With the model, the computationally complex but fully quantifiable Pac-Man behavior paradigm provides a new approach to understanding animals’ advanced cognition.

Data availability

The data and codes that support the findings of this study are provided at: https://github.com/superr90/Monkey_PacMan.

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Qianli Yang

    Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4226-2319

  2. Zhongqiao Lin

    Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  3. Wenyi Zhang

    Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  4. Jianshu Li

    Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  5. Xiyuan Chen

    Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  6. Jiaqi Zhang

    Brown University, Providence, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1649-3378

  7. Tianming Yang

    Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    For correspondence
    tyang@ion.ac.cn
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6976-9246

Funding

Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB32070100)

  • Tianming Yang

Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (2018SHZDZX05)

  • Tianming Yang

National Natural Science Foundation of China (32100832)

  • Qianli Yang

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Alicia Izquierdo, University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All procedures followed the protocol approved by the Animal Care Committee of Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CEBSIT-2021004).

Version history

  1. Preprint posted: October 4, 2021 (view preprint)
  2. Received: October 7, 2021
  3. Accepted: March 13, 2022
  4. Accepted Manuscript published: March 14, 2022 (version 1)
  5. Version of Record published: March 29, 2022 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2022, Yang 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.

Metrics

  • 3,364
    views
  • 433
    downloads
  • 7
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Qianli Yang
  2. Zhongqiao Lin
  3. Wenyi Zhang
  4. Jianshu Li
  5. Xiyuan Chen
  6. Jiaqi Zhang
  7. Tianming Yang
(2022)
Monkey plays Pac-Man with compositional strategies and hierarchical decision-making
eLife 11:e74500.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74500

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74500

Categories and tags

Research organism

Further reading

    1. Medicine
    2. Neuroscience

    Txnip deletions and missense alleles prolong the survival of cones in a retinitis pigmentosa mouse model

    Yunlu Xue, Yimin Zhou, Constance L Cepko
    Research Advance

    Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is an inherited retinal disease in which there is a loss of cone-mediated daylight vision. As there are >100 disease genes, our goal is to preserve cone vision in a disease gene-agnostic manner. Previously we showed that overexpressing TXNIP, an α-arrestin protein, prolonged cone vision in RP mouse models, using an AAV to express it only in cones. Here, we expressed different alleles of Txnip in the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE), a support layer for cones. Our goal was to learn more of TXNIP’s structure-function relationships for cone survival, as well as determine the optimal cell type expression pattern for cone survival. The C-terminal half of TXNIP was found to be sufficient to remove GLUT1 from the cell surface, and improved RP cone survival, when expressed in the RPE, but not in cones. Knock-down of HSP90AB1, a TXNIP-interactor which regulates metabolism, improved the survival of cones alone and was additive for cone survival when combined with TXNIP. From these and other results, it is likely that TXNIP interacts with several proteins in the RPE to indirectly support cone survival, with some of these interactions different from those that lead to cone survival when expressed only in cones.

    1. Neuroscience

    Parallel processing of quickly and slowly mobilized reserve vesicles in hippocampal synapses

    Juan Jose Rodriguez Gotor, Kashif Mahfooz ... John F Wesseling
    Research Article

    Vesicles within presynaptic terminals are thought to be segregated into a variety of readily releasable and reserve pools. The nature of the pools and trafficking between them is not well understood, but pools that are slow to mobilize when synapses are active are often assumed to feed pools that are mobilized more quickly, in a series. However, electrophysiological studies of synaptic transmission have suggested instead a parallel organization where vesicles within slowly and quickly mobilized reserve pools would separately feed independent reluctant- and fast-releasing subdivisions of the readily releasable pool. Here, we use FM-dyes to confirm the existence of multiple reserve pools at hippocampal synapses and a parallel organization that prevents intermixing between the pools, even when stimulation is intense enough to drive exocytosis at the maximum rate. The experiments additionally demonstrate extensive heterogeneity among synapses in the relative sizes of the slowly and quickly mobilized reserve pools, which suggests equivalent heterogeneity in the numbers of reluctant and fast-releasing readily releasable vesicles that may be relevant for understanding information processing and storage.

    1. Evolutionary Biology
    2. Neuroscience

    Large-scale deorphanization of Nematostella vectensis neuropeptide G protein-coupled receptors supports the independent expansion of bilaterian and cnidarian peptidergic systems

    Daniel Thiel, Luis Alfonso Yañez Guerra ... Gáspár Jékely
    Research Article

    Neuropeptides are ancient signaling molecules in animals but only few peptide receptors are known outside bilaterians. Cnidarians possess a large number of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) – the most common receptors of bilaterian neuropeptides – but most of these remain orphan with no known ligands. We searched for neuropeptides in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis and created a library of 64 peptides derived from 33 precursors. In a large-scale pharmacological screen with these peptides and 161 N. vectensis GPCRs, we identified 31 receptors specifically activated by 1 to 3 of 14 peptides. Mapping GPCR and neuropeptide expression to single-cell sequencing data revealed how cnidarian tissues are extensively connected by multilayer peptidergic networks. Phylogenetic analysis identified no direct orthology to bilaterian peptidergic systems and supports the independent expansion of neuropeptide signaling in cnidarians from a few ancestral peptide-receptor pairs.