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Results for “Choice Behavior”

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At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
PubMed1977

Behavioral choice: neural mechanisms in Pleurobranchaea.

In the marine mollusk Pleurobranchaea, it is known that feeding occurs and withdrawal from tactile stimuli is suppressed when the sensory stimuli for feeding and withdrawal are presented simultaneously. This "dominance" of feeding behavior over withdrawal behavior occurs because the central nervous network controlling feeding inhibits the central nervous network controlling withdrawal. The inhibition is mediated by a bilaterally symmetrical pair of reidentifiable feeding neurons that are members of the "corollary discharge" population in the buccal ganglion. This study supports the hypothesis that inhibitory interactions between competing motor systems are responsible for the "singleness of action" that characterizes animal behavior.

Animals↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Effect of ethanol self-administration on choice behavior: money vs. socializing.

Volunteer chronic alcoholic subjects were exposed to a discrete-trail choice procedure within a residential research setting. Twelve daily trials occurred at 20 min intervals. In each trial a subject chose between 2 mutually exclusive options involving either receipt of money or the opportunity for socializing. The effect of ethanol self-administration was evaluated by requiring randomly over days that a subject consume either 8 drinks of orange juice or 8 drinks of ethanol (89.12 g ethanol total). For all 4 subjects, the mean rate of choosing socialization over money was significantly greater on sessions involving ethanol self-administration than on sessions involving orange juice self-administration.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Choice behavior in transition: development of preference with ratio and interval schedules.

In Experiment 1, the choice responses of 8 pigeons were observed during 50 periods of transition. Each condition began with equal probabilities of reinforcement on 2 response keys and switched to unequal probabilities. With the ratio of the 2 probabilities held constant, preference for the higher probability developed more rapidly when the 2 probabilities were high than when they were low. In Experiment 2, each condition began with 2 equal variable-interval schedules, but later 1 key delivered 60%, 75%, or 90% of the reinforcers. The rate of approach to asymptotic performance was roughly the same with all 3 reinforcement percentages. These and previous results pose difficulties for some well-known models of acquisition, but the results are well described by a simple model that states that the strength of each response is independently increased by reinforcement and decreased by nonreinforcement.

Animals↗
PubMed2000

Asking questions can change choice behavior: does it do so automatically or effortfully?

The present research uses a technique that permits unique estimation of both automatic and effortful processes in the question-behavior link. Results show that individuals asked to report behavioral intent (vs. those not asked) are more likely to choose options that are highly accessible and positively valenced, regardless of cognitive resources available at the time of processing. This suggests that the effect of intent questions on subsequent behavior is primarily the result of automatic, as opposed to effortful, processing. Practically, this suggests that efforts to debias this robust effect need to affect nonconscious processes and adjust for the automatic impact of being asked an intention question on respondents' behavior.

Automatism↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Adolescents' perspectives and food choice behaviors in terms of the environmental impacts of food production practices: application of a psychosocial model.

The objective of this study was to investigate adolescents' perspectives about the environmental impacts of food production practices and whether these perspectives are related to their food choice. Food choice was operationalized as consumption and purchase of organic foods and locally grown foods. A survey questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of adolescents and analyzed for descriptive information and relationships among variables. Subjects were 651 ethnically diverse, urban and suburban high school senior students in a major metropolitan area. Variables of an Expanded Theory of Planned Behavior were measured including beliefs, attitudes, perceived social influences, motivation to comply, perceived behavioral control, self-identity, perceived responsibility, behavioral intention, and behavior. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficients, and stepwise multiple regression analyses were used. Surveyed adolescents did not have strong or consistent beliefs or attitudes about the environmental impact of food production practices. Cognitive-motivational processes were at work, however, since their perspectives were significantly correlated with behavioral intentions and food choice behaviors. Behavioral intention was best accounted for by attitudes and perceived social influences (and perceived responsibility for organic food), and behavior was best accounted for by behavioral intentions, beliefs, and perceived social influences (and self-identity for local food). There is a need to make salient to adolescents the environmental impact of food production practices through both cognitive and experiential approaches.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

A comparison of consensus and nonconsensus approaches to modeling contraceptive choice behavior.

This paper develops a more general model of contraceptive choice, taking into account a fundamental difference between the condom and the contraceptive pill, the two most commonly used reversible contraceptives in the US. The pill produces a single output of pregnancy prevention, but the condom is an input into a joint production for both pregnancy prevention and disease protection. Since the condom is ultimately used by the male, and the pill by the female, noncooperative game theory is used to model the separate male and female utility functions. Using both Stackelberg and Nash as solution concepts, econometric specifications are derived and the models are compared with the specifications derived from a consensus model of the household. Simultaneous-move Nash best describes the behavior of unmarried and noncohabiting sexual partners, and female-leader Stackelberg outperforms the other models for married or cohabiting couples.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

[Participation of the nucleus accumbens in acquisition of spatial choice behavior in rats performing in a radial plus maze].

The role of medial shell of the nucleus accumbens in acquisition of spatial behavior was studied in rats performing choice task in radial maze with asymmetrical water reinforcement. It has been found that the nucleus accumbens lesioned rats failed in finding larger rewards but preserve their reward-seeking behavior guided by visual discriminative stimuli. The results obtained are in good agreement with suggestion that the nucleus accumbens is a site of convergence of spatial information (from hippocampus) with reward information (from amygdala and VTA), providing bridge for effective limbic-motor interface underlying motivated goal-directed behavior in animals.

Animals↗
PubMed1991

Animal choice behavior and the evolution of cognitive architecture.

Animals process sensory information according to specific computational rules and, subsequently, form representations of their environments that form the basis for decisions and choices. The specific computational rules used by organisms will often be evolutionarily adaptive by generating higher probabilities of survival, reproduction, and resource acquisition. Experiments with enclosed colonies of bumblebees constrained to foraging on artificial flowers suggest that the bumblebee's cognitive architecture is designed to efficiently exploit floral resources from spatially structured environments given limits on memory and the neuronal processing of information. A non-linear relationship between the biomechanics of nectar extraction and rates of net energetic gain by individual bees may account for sensitivities to both the arithmetic mean and variance in reward distributions in flowers. Heuristic rules that lead to efficient resource exploitation may also lead to subjective misperception of likelihoods. Subjective probability formation may then be viewed as a problem in pattern recognition subject to specific sampling schemes and memory constraints.

Animals↗
PubMed1988

Risky-choice behavior: a life-span analysis.

The purpose of the present study was to systemically test the hypothesis that older people adopt risk-avoiding strategies when faced with risky-choice situations. Ninety-six adults, representing four age cohorts, filled out a risk-taking questionnaire consisting of twelve situations demanding a choice between a safe and a risky option. One-half of the choices involved potential losses, the other half involved potential gains. The results indicated that older adults choose no more safe alternatives than do younger adults. Additionally, for all age cohorts, risk avoiding was more evident when choices were between risky and certain gains than when choices were between risky and certain losses. This pattern of responding suggests that older adults do not necessarily adopt a general strategy of avoiding risk options when a safe alternative is available. Instead, risk avoiding, for all age cohorts, appears to be influenced by the parameters of the choice situation.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Effects of naltrexone, and d-amphetamine, and their interaction on the stimulus control of choice behavior of rats.

The hypothesis that endogenous opioid peptides modulate attentional processes was tested. The effects of the opioid antagonist naltrexone (NALT), d-amphetamine (AMP), and their interaction were investigated in rats trained in a two-choice task in which the position of a short-duration light served as a cue for food-reinforced responses. NALT (0.25, 1.0, 5.0, and 10.0 mg/kg) produced no significant changes in performance (accuracy, choice latency, and food retrieval time). As predicted, AMP induced dose-dependent biphasic effects. Low doses of AMP (0.25 and 0.5 mg/kg) significantly enhanced accuracy, decreased choice latency, and lengthened food retrieval time; 1.25 mg/kg AMP disrupted accuracy, increased choice latency, and further lengthened food retrieval time. The combination of NALT (0.25, 1.0, and 10.0 mg/kg) and subthreshold doses of AMP (0.07 and 0.1 mg/kg) had no effect on performance except for an increase in food retrieval time with 10.0 mg/kg NALT, whereas the combination of NALT and moderate doses of AMP (0.5 and 1.0 mg/kg) disrupted accuracy, increased choice latencies, and lengthened food retrieval time. These results do not support the hypothesis that endogenous opioid peptides play a vital role in attentional processes or that opioid antagonists may be useful in the treatment of attentional deficit disorders.

Animals↗
PubMed1978

Choice behavior in rhesus monkeys: cocaine versus food.

Rhesus monkeys were allowed to choose between intravenous injections of cocaine and food reinforcement for lever pressing. A choice trial was available every 15 minutes continuously for 8 days. The animals chose cocaine almost exclusively, which resulted in high cocaine intake, decreased food intake, weight loss, and marked behavioral toxicity. The study provides evidence of the reinforcing efficacy of cocaine.

Animals↗
PubMed1997

The neuronal basis of the behavioral choice between swimming and shortening in the leech: control is not selectively exercised at higher circuit levels.

Swimming and the whole-body shortening reflex are two incompatible behaviors performed by the medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis. We set out to examine the neuronal basis of the choice between these behaviors, taking advantage of the fact that the neuronal circuit underlying swimming is relatively well understood. The leech swim circuit is organized hierarchically and contains three interneuronal levels, including two upper levels of "command-like" neurons. We tested the responses of the swim circuit neurons to stimuli that produced shortening, using reduced preparations in which neurophysiological recording could be performed while behaviors were elicited. We found that the majority of the swim circuit neurons, including most of the command-like cells and all of the cells at the highest hierarchical level of the circuit, were excited by stimuli that produced shortening as well as by stimuli that produced swimming. Only a subset of neurons, at levels below the top, were inhibited during shortening; these included one of the command-like cells and an oscillator cell (an interneuron that is part of the central pattern generator for swimming). These results imply that the control of the choice between swimming and shortening is not exercised selectively at the higher levels of the swim circuit.

Action Potentials↗