Temporal discounting and decision-making in aged rats

描述（由申请人提供）：在立即获得小奖励或等待更大奖励之间的决定是许多生物一生中面临的关键问题。这种能力来自多个决策系统之间的相互作用，与自我控制有关，与成瘾倾向呈负相关。重要的是，这些系统之间的平衡在生命周期中会发生变化，但这种变化的机制尚不清楚。在大鼠中，等待更大奖励的意愿通常是通过将两个选项置于直接冲突中来衡量的，例如在滴定延迟任务中，延迟是滴定的，直到两个选择相等。滴定延迟任务作为研究机制的一种手段的问题是，它通常不能平滑地滴定，不能提供完整的折扣曲线。我们已经开发了一个新的空间版本的滴定贴现任务，在一个单一的会话可靠的滴定，并允许跨会话贴现曲线参数的直接测量。我们建议使用这个新的贴现任务来确定整个生命周期中贴现率的变化。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The decision between taking a small reward immediately or waiting for a larger reward later is a critical one faced by many creatures throughout their lives. This ability derives from an interaction between multiple decision-making systems and is related to self-control, and inversely related to addiction liability. Importantly, he balance between those systems changes over the lifespan, but the mechanism of that change is unknown. In rats, willingness to wait for a larger reward is usually measured by putting the two options into direct conflict, such as in the titrated delay task, in which the delay is titrated unil the two choices are equal. The problem with the titrated delay task as a means to study mechanism is that it does not generally titrate smoothly and cannot provide a complete discounting curve. We have developed a new spatial version of the titrated discounting task that titrates within a single session reliably and allows the direct measurement of discounting curve parameters across sessions. We propose to use this new discounting task to determine the changes in discounting rates across the lifespan.