2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Leap before you look: Choice of impulsive strategies for reward maximisation
| Project/Area Number |
20K20142
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| Research Institution | Chiba University |
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Principal Investigator |
渡辺 安里依 千葉大学, 大学院人文科学研究院, 准教授 (90738949)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2023-03-31
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| Keywords | impulsivity / comparative cognition |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The main objective of the current project is to create an animal model of impulsivity by identifying factors and contexts responsible for impulsive behaviours. More specifically, the project aims to investigate whether there is a difference in frequency of exhibited impulsive choice in tasks that vary in nature and difficulty. Furthermore, between-species comparison will be made with pigeons and domestic cats to identify genetic and environmental factors that influence impulsivity.
The first year of the project included mainly three studies. Two of them investigated the mechanisms of pigeon spatial attention: one on attention towards moving targets and one on identifying the nature of the movements. The results from these studies not only contribute towards designing the spatial impulsivity task, which will be conducted in the following year, but are significant in themselves for publication in international journals after sufficient follow-up experiments have been completed.
The third study investigated the relation between personality and behaviour in cats. It was found that the cats’ looking behaviour towards moving stimuli on a monitor negatively correlated with the owners’ rating of playfulness on a personality questionnaire. This discrepancy raises the possibility that impulsivity of cats as rated by human owners may also be different from impulsivity assessed in a behavioural task. The results from this study was presented at a national conference in autumn 2020.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
The original plan of the project was to use stationary targets in the spatial impulsivity task. With the data on response times to moving targets that was collected in the first year, it is now possible to make improvements on the design of the spatial impulsivity task.
In addition, two new pigeon experiments, one on relation between metacognition and impulsivity, and another on source memory, are currently under way. Training of the subjects is nearly complete on these experiments and testing will start soon. These will be used as alternative methods to the standard and mnemonic impulsivity tasks which were in the original proposal. Such minor changes allow wider implication of the results to cognitive abilities such as metacognition and episodic memory.
Subject recruitment of pet cats is also progressing smoothly. The experimental apparatus for testing spatial cognition is being built and testing should start next month.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
The second year of the project will focus on impulsivity in mnemonic and metacognitive tasks for pigeons. The base performance on the tasks will be studied as well as behavioural costs each individual chooses to pay to improve their performance. The subjects will then be presented with the alternative task to investigate if their tendency to choose costly behaviours will be stable across various contexts.
Furthermore, domestic cats will be tested in their homes for their understanding of spatial cognition and food searching behaviours. These behavioural measures will be combined with personality data obtained in the first year to look for any existing relations. Recruitment will continue in the second year and beyond to allow for increased sample size and additional experiments if necessary.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Due to the situation with COVID-19, the conference was held online and, thus, no travel fees were required. Furthermore, because we could only visit participants living close to the university, transport costs were less than the proposed plan. Assuming that the situation will improve in the following years, saved costs will be needed for transport fees to visit distant participants and to repurchase cat snacks that has gone past their expiration dates. Personnel expenditure will also be required later to analyse the collected data which should have been done in the first year.
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