The serial organization of behavior: studies with the mid-session reversal task

• Grant number: 22/16315-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: June 01, 2023
• End date: May 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Experimental Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Marcelo Bussotti Reyes
• Grantee: Marcelo Bussotti Reyes
• Host Institution: Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Armando Domingos Batista Machado ; Fulvio Rieli Mendes ; Marcelo Salvador Caetano

Abstract

Dilemmas about staying with an action or changing to another permeate human life. However, the processes that govern how and how much we change our actions are far from understood. An experimental paradigm used with animals has given interesting clues: Midsession reversal learning. In this paradigm, the animal chooses between two distinct stimuli, S1 and S2. The choice of S1 is rewarded in the first moment of the session (in the first half, for example) and the choice of S2 is rewarded during the remainder of the session. That is, in the middle of the session, the positive and negative stimuli are reversed. Previous studies show that pigeons adopt a suboptimal strategy, initially preferring S1 but, as the inversion moment approaches, they start to choose S2 more and more, committing anticipation errors. After the inversion, they continue to choose S1 a few times, making perseveration errors, which decrease at the end of the session. Other studies show that rats adapt to the inversion task differently depending on the context in which the task takes place. In one context, in operant conditioning boxes, they learn to choose almost optimally, preferring S1 until this option is no longer rewarded, and then starting to prefer S2. In another context, rats learn suboptimally, similarly to pigeons. There is evidence that in this second context, the rats base their successive choices on the time elapsed since the beginning of the session. The project aims to study why this difference in learning strategy occurs. More concretely, if, by changing the choice procedure, we can determine the strategy that the mouse follows. The results of the proposed studies and the comparison of these results with those obtained with other species, including human beings, will allow us to better understand the basic processes of learning in general and the cognitive flexibility of animals. (AU)