Translating from Rats to Humans: A Human Foraging Model of Decision-Making

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Animal models of addiction are some of the most highly regarded models of psychopathology. As a result, treatments for humans are often developed based on animal addiction models. However, there remains a disconnection between these pre-clinical models and treatment outcomes. Some researchers suggest that the gap in translating pre-clinical to clinical models stems from untested assumptions that different species recruit the same cognitive substrates on the modeled tasks. Therefore, there is a need for research than can verify that animal and human decision-making systems are comparable, which in turn, could improve the generalizability of results across these research stages. Effective translational paradigms are needed to test similarities (or differences) in cognitive processes across species. The present proposal introduces a novel experiential foraging paradigm for humans, which was designed based on a go/no-go foraging paradigm for rats (Restaurant Row). In the Restaurant Row paradigm, an animal has a fixed amount of time to traverse a circular track collecting food rewards after variable delay times from different "restaurants." This paradigm successfully captured individual differences in preference, as well as behavioral and neural signatures of emotional constructs (e.g. regret, disappointment). In the proposed human variant (called the Web-Surf task), humans make a series of go/no-go decisions as they travel between video galleries that present different types of video clips after variable delays. The human variant was designed to mimic the rat variant while also considering natural human ethology. Preliminary analyses in human subjects suggest the two paradigms capture similar behavioral mechanisms. The first aim of the proposed project is to examine whether the Web- Surf task equivalently measures emotional constructs, such as regret. The first aim also seeks to elucidate whether individual differences in behavioral task performance map onto variations in impulsive traits. The second aim of the proposed project is to determine whether the Web-Surf task captures neural signatures of deliberation and emotional processing as seen in rats. This will be accomplished using general linear modeling and machine learning approaches for processing functional neuroimaging data. This task could be pivotal in reducing the gap between pre-clinical and clinical research, and more importantly, advancing the development of addiction treatments for humans.