Differential replay for reward and punishment paths predicts approach and avoidance

Planning is thought to involve neural replay, where states relevant to a task goal are rapidly reactivated in sequence. It remains unclear if, during planning, replay of a path relates to an actual prospective choice. Here, using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we studied participants while they planned to either approach or avoid an uncertain environment that contained paths leading to reward and to punishment. We show significant planning-related forward sequential replay with state-to-state transitions in the range of 20 to 90 ms. Replay of rewarding paths was boosted prior to a decision to avoid, and attenuated prior to a decision to approach. Crucially, a trial-by-trial bias in replaying punishing paths predicted an irrational choice to approach when a prospective environment was more risky, an effect that was particularly marked in more anxious participants. The findings reveal a coupling between the content of forwards replay and rational choice behaviour, such that replay prioritises an online representation of potential reward.

Modeling and Predicting Commuters' Travel Mode Choice in Lahore, Pakistan

The travel mode preference exists in both culture and theenvironment. The wide scale of people's mobility makesour cities more polluted and congested, eventually affecting urban assets.Understanding people’s mode choice is important to develop urbantransportation planning policies effectively. This study aims to model andpredict the commuter’s mode choice behaviour in Lahore, Pakistan. A surveywas conducted, and the data was used for model validation. Thecomparative study was further done among multinomial logit model (MNL),Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classificationapproaches. It’s common in existing studies that vehicle ownership is rankedas the most important among all features impacting commuters’ travel modechoice. Since many commuters in Lahore own no vehicle, it’s unclear whatthe rank of factors impacting non-vehicle owners is. Other than thecomparison of predicting the performance of the methods, our contributionis to do more analysis of the rank of factors impacting the different types ofcommuters. It was observed that occupation is ranked as the most importantamong all features for non-vehicle owners.

Internality and the internalisation of failure: Evidence from a novel task

A critical facet of adjusting one’s behaviour after succeeding or failing at a task is assigning responsibility for the ultimate outcome. Humans have trait- and state-like tendencies to implicate aspects of their own behaviour (called ‘internal’ ascriptions) or facets of the particular task or Lady Luck (’chance’). However, how these tendencies interact with actual performance is unclear. We designed a novel task in which subjects had to learn the likelihood of achieving their goals, and the extent to which this depended on their efforts. High internality (Levenson I-score) was associated with decision making patterns that are less vulnerable to failure. Our computational analyses suggested that this depended heavily on the adjustment in the perceived achievability of riskier goals following failure. We found beliefs about chance not to be explanatory of choice behaviour in our task. Beliefs about powerful others were strong predictors of behaviour, but only when subjects lacked substantial influence over the outcome. Our results provide an evidentiary basis for heuristics and learning differences that underlie the formation and maintenance of control expectations by the self.

Consumer Profile and Product Knowledge Affect the Usefulness of a Quality Label as a Tool to Differentiate a Product: A Chilean Survey

Quality labels are useful tools to differentiate food products, but only if consumers recognise them and associate them with specific characteristics. An online survey was conducted to investigate whether Chilean consumers knew about Novillo de Osorno, for which a quality label is being developed. The survey was divided into five blocks: lifestyles, meat consumption and purchase habits, meat choice behaviour, knowledge about Novillo de Osorno, and consumers’ socio-demographic information. The place of residence and consumer gender, age, or income were important cues in defining consumers’ lifestyles, meat consumption and purchase habits. Respondents could be grouped into three main groups: 1. Younger people: urban with medium-high incomes, which search only for pleasure; 2. Foodies uninvolved and Females uninvolved: females with the highest income level that chose food for nutritional reasons; and 3. Traditional people: men older than 55 with low incomes, living in the Northern areas and interested in taste and in the meat’s origin. Nearly 60% of respondents had never heard about Novillo de Osorno. Hence, the supply chain has an opportunity to extend the market. Since price and confidence in the origin are important cues, they must be considered in the design of promotion strategies.

Consumers' active choice behavior promotes coevolutionary units

Individual behavior, and local context are processes that can influence the structure and evolution of ecological interactions. In trophic interactions, consumers can increase their fitness by actively choosing resources they are able to explore. The effect of active choice on interaction network structure and their coevolution is not well known. Using an individual-based model, we modeled a community of several species that interact antagonistically. The trait of each individual is modelled explicitly and subjected to the interaction pressure. Besides, each consumer can actively choose to interact with resources that maximize its fitness. We show that active consumer choice can generate coevolutionary units, that is, the modules are formed by coevolution and stay stable over time. Besides, inside each module resource traits converge which promotes attack dilution: when resources converge their traits, the pool of options for a consumer increases and the chance of a specific individual being attacked decreases. We also observed that active consumer choice impacts network structure, with networks more modular and specialized and less connected and nested as the number of consumer choices increase. Thus, we emphasize that the consumers'ctive choice behaviour plays an important role in the ecological and evolutionary aprocesses that structure these communities.

Perceived fatigue does not alter effort-based decision making, but does undermine confidence in the ability to perform physical actions

Introduction: Protracted physical exertion leads to the development of fatigue. The development of fatigue has previously been associated with increased effort costs, influencing decisions to engage in further physical activity. However, whether fatigue-associated changes to effort-based decisions are reflective of a global aversion to effort in response to fatiguing physical exertion, affecting the decision to engage in physical action performed in other parts of the body, is unclear. Methods: To investigate this, we tested whether effort-based choice behaviour was altered by fatigue, pre-induced through physical exertion of a different body part. Twenty-two healthy male participants made a series of choices between two rewarded actions, which varied in both the level of effort required (relative duration of a submaximal contraction of the dominant knee extensors) and reward obtained (monetary incentives). Participants made their choice under two conditions: 1) a pre-induced state of fatigue and 2) a rested (control) state. Results: Across conditions, participants’ choice behaviour demonstrated the anticipated aversion to effort that interacted with the level of reward on offer. However, though prior physical exertion increased the perception of fatigue, prolonged choice selection-time and reduced self-reported confidence in ability to perform chosen effort-demanding actions, participants choice behaviour did not significantly differ between the two conditions. Conclusions:. The findings suggest that a subjective state of fatigue does not increase the general cost of exerting effort across the body but does increase uncertainty within decision-making processes which may alter evaluative processes that precede changes in cost/benefit computations.