Mice learn to avoid regret
Fig 2
Changes in economic decisions in an increasingly reward-scarce environment.
(A-B) Primary dependent variables: total earned food intake (A) and reinforcement rate (B), measured as average time between earnings. Transition to the 1–30 s block caused a significant decrease in food intake and reinforcement rate. By approximately day 32, food intake and reinforcement rate renormalized back to stable baseline levels compared to previous testing in reward-rich environments. The epoch marked in pink defines this renormalization to baseline and is used throughout the remaining longitudinal plots. (C) Number of self-paced laps run (serially encountering an offer in each of the 4 restaurants). (D) Proportion of total offers entered versus skipped. Horizontal dashed line represents 0.5 level. (E) Proportion of total enters earned versus quit. Horizontal dashed line represents 0.5 level. (F) Economic decision thresholds: OZ and WZ choice outcomes as a function of cost. Horizontal dashed lines represent the maximum possible threshold in each block. Data are presented as the cohort’s (N = 31) daily means (±1 SE) across the entire experiment. Color code on the x-axis reflects the stages of training (offer cost ranges denoted from 1 to the number on the top of panel A). Vertical dashed lines (except pink) represent offer block transitions. * on the x-axis indicates immediate significant behavioral change at the block transition; otherwise, * indicates gradual significant changes within the 1–30 s block during either the early 2 wk adaptation period or late pink epoch. Data available as a supplemental file. OZ, offer zone; WZ, wait zone