An Animal Model of Decision Making: Vicarious Trial-and-Error in Tasks Requiring Memory for Visual Associations or Spatial Locations

Abstract

To assess the neural substrates of deliberative decision-making, it is useful to have a tractable animal model of this cognitive process. In this chapter we describe one potential marker of deliberative decision making in rodents: the back-and-forth head movements of the animal as it makes a decision, also referred to as vicarious trial-and-errors (VTEs). We quantify these in a spatial reversal task and a visual discrimination task, and observe that they exhibit different patterns in these tasks. This result indicates that there may be at least two types of VTEs: exploratory and deliberative.