scholarly journals Human vicarious trial and error is predictive of spatial navigation performance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diogo Santos-Pata ◽  
Paul FMJ Verschure

ABSTRACTWhen learning new environments, rats often pause at decision points and look back and forth over their possible trajectories as if they were imagining the future outcome of their actions, a behavior termed “Vicarious trial and error” (VTE). As the animal learns the environmental configuration, rats change from deliberative to habitual behavior, and VTE tends to disappear, suggesting a functional relevance in the early stages of learning. Despite the extensive research on spatial navigation, learning and VTE in the rat model, fewer studies have focused on humans. Here, we tested whether head-scanning behaviors that humans typically exhibit during spatial navigation are as predictive of spatial learning as in the rat. Subjects performed a goal-oriented virtual navigation task in a symmetric environment. Spatial learning was assessed through the analysis of trajectories, timings, and head orientations, under habitual and deliberative spatial navigation conditions. As expected, we found that trajectory length and duration decreased with the trial number, implying that subjects learned the spatial configuration of the environment over trials. Interestingly, IdPhi (a standard metric of VTE) also decreased with the trial number, suggesting that humans benefit from the same head-orientation scanning behavior as rats at spatial decision-points. Moreover, IdPhi captured exclusively at the first decision-point of each trial, was correlated with trial trajectory duration and length. Our findings demonstrate that in VTE is a signature of the stage of spatial learning in humans, and can be used to predict performance in navigation tasks with high accuracy.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Schmitzer-Torbert

Studies of decision-making in rodents have demonstrated that vicarious trial-and-error (VTE) is an important behavioral index of deliberation, when animals search through and evaluate the available options before making a decision. In rodents, VTE is enhanced during the use of hippocampally-dependent place strategies, which may represent a type of model-based behavior. While some evidence exists for VTE-like behaviors in humans during navigation, it is unknown if VTE in humans is specifically associated place-strategies, as would be predicted for model-based behaviors. To address this gap, humans were tested in navigation tasks in symmetrical environments, which allowed for the use of probe trials to assess navigation strategies (place or response) or impose them directly. The use of place strategies (on probe trials and place-training) was associated with increases in measures of VTE (reorientations and pausing) especially at high-cost decision points, similar to results from rodent studies. In contrast, response-strategies were associated with the development of efficient, stereotyped trajectories (consistent with model-free learning). These results support the identification of place- and response-strategies in human navigation with model-based and model-free learning, respectively, and demonstrate that VTE is specifically related to the use of place-strategies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (7) ◽  
pp. 322-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Pezzulo ◽  
Emilio Cartoni ◽  
Francesco Rigoli ◽  
Léo Pio-Lopez ◽  
Karl Friston

2020 ◽  
Vol 174 ◽  
pp. 107276
Author(s):  
Seiichiro Amemiya ◽  
Maina Ishida ◽  
Natsuko Kubota ◽  
Takeshi Nishijima ◽  
Ichiro Kita

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