Vicarious trial and error

Redish, A. David

doi:10.1038/nrn.2015.30

Cited by 414 publications

(577 citation statements)

References 164 publications

(375 reference statements)

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“…After the emergence of vision above the water line, the total volume of space monitored by vision in daylight conditions increased 1 million-fold over that of water in full sunlight, enabling (although not necessitating) complex "deliberative mode" strategies (29,53,55) with respect to the most unpredictable features of our environment: other animals. Emergence onto land, with its complex environmental geometry (56) featuring multiple paths toward prey or away from predators, would have furthered the selective benefit of more complex control strategies that take more time to compute than the simplest reactive strategies.…”

Section: Implications Of Long-range Vision For Reactive Neural Circuimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With the evolution of suitable brain circuitry, certain animals were able to consider multiple options for pursuit or evasion that are likely to enhance fitness, such as by vicarious trial and error behavior in rodents, in which future possibilities are imagined (53,64). Vicarious trial and error, like other forms of prospective cognition or "mental time travel," are dependent on the hippocampus.…”

Section: Implications Of Long-range Vision For Reactive Neural Circuimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates

MacIver

Schmitz

Mugan

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The evolution of terrestrial vertebrates, starting around 385 million years ago, is an iconic moment in evolution that brings to mind images of fish transforming into four-legged animals. Here, we show that this radical change in body shape was preceded by an equally dramatic change in sensory abilities akin to transitioning from seeing over short distances in a dense fog to seeing over long distances on a clear day. Measurements of eye sockets and simulations of their evolution show that eyes nearly tripled in size just before vertebrates began living on land. Computational simulations of these animal's visual ecology show that for viewing objects through water, the increase in eye size provided a negligible increase in performance. However, when viewing objects through air, the increase in eye size provided a large increase in performance. The jump in eye size was, therefore, unlikely to have arisen for seeing through water and instead points to an unexpected hybrid of seeing through air while still primarily inhabiting water. Our results and several anatomical innovations arising at the same time suggest lifestyle similarity to crocodiles. The consequent combination of the increase in eye size and vision through air would have conferred a 1 million-fold increase in the amount of space within which objects could be seen. The "buena vista" hypothesis that our data suggest is that seeing opportunities from afar played a role in the subsequent evolution of fully terrestrial limbs as well as the emergence of elaborated action sequences through planning circuits in the nervous system. fish-tetrapod transition | vision | visual ecology | terrestriality | prospective cognition B efore terrestrial vertebrates arose, their ancestors inhabited underwater environments, where vision is highly compromised compared with vision above water. The visual difference between life in water and life above it is comparable with driving fast on a foggy road, where our responses must be rapid and simple, vs. driving in clear daylight conditions, where deliberation over more complex choices is enabled by the vast increase in sensory range. Nonetheless, although an immense quantity of work has been done on the emergence of limbs during the evolution of land vertebrates, how visual capability changed during the transition from water to land has not been explored. In part, this lack of exploration is because computational visual ecology-necessary to interpret the fossil data-has not been combined with early tetrapod paleontology. Through combining these disciplines, here we probe the evolutionary history of the switch in our visual sensory ecology from water to air. Surprisingly, our results show that eyes tripled in size just before full-time life on land evolved. Convergent lines of evidence, including our own, strongly support the hypothesis that a crocodilian ecotype-using the greatly enhanced visual capabilities conferred by vision through air to prey on the bounty of unexploited invertebrates that long preceded the vertebrates onto ...

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Section: Implications Of Long-range Vision For Reactive Neural Circuimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Implications Of Long-range Vision For Reactive Neural Circuimentioning

confidence: 99%

Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates

MacIver

Schmitz

Mugan

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…In short, dynamical patterns of neuronal activations that code for behavioural trajectories (i.e., sequence of place cells) are observed in the rodent hippocampus both when animals are actively engaged in overt spatial navigation, and when they are disengaged from the sensorimotor loop, e.g., when they sleep or groom after consuming a food-the latter depending on an internally-generated, spontaneous mode of neuronal processing that generally does not require external sensory inputs. Internally-generated sequences that mimic closely (albeit within different dynamical modes) neuronal activations observed during overt navigation have been proposed to be neuronal instantiations of internal models, which play multiple roles including memory consolidation and planning-thus illustrating a possible way the brain might reuse brain dynamics/internal models in a "dual mode", across overt and covert cognitive processes [132][133][134][135][136][137]. An intriguing neurobiological possibility is that the internal models that produce internally generated sequences are formed by exploiting pre-existing internal neuronal dynamics that are initially "meaningless", but acquire their "meaning" (e.g., code for a specific behavioural trajectory of the animal) through situated interaction, when the internal (spontaneous) and external dynamics become coupled [138].…”

Section: Model-based Approaches To Active Perception and Control: Conmentioning

confidence: 99%

Model-Based Approaches to Active Perception and Control

Pezzulo

Rigoli

Iodice

et al. 2017

Entropy

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Abstract:There is an on-going debate in cognitive (neuro) science and philosophy between classical cognitive theory and embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive ("4-Es") views of cognition-a family of theories that emphasize the role of the body in cognition and the importance of brain-body-environment interaction over and above internal representation. This debate touches foundational issues, such as whether the brain internally represents the external environment, and "infers" or "computes" something. Here we focus on two (4-Es-based) criticisms to traditional cognitive theories-to the notions of passive perception and of serial information processing-and discuss alternative ways to address them, by appealing to frameworks that use, or do not use, notions of internal modelling and inference. Our analysis illustrates that: an explicitly inferential framework can capture some key aspects of embodied and enactive theories of cognition; some claims of computational and dynamical theories can be reconciled rather than seen as alternative explanations of cognitive phenomena; and some aspects of cognitive processing (e.g., detached cognitive operations, such as planning and imagination) that are sometimes puzzling to explain from enactive and non-representational perspectives can, instead, be captured nicely from the perspective that internal generative models and predictive processing mediate adaptive control loops.

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“…As navigational learning increases, attention allocated for sensory precessing decreases and motor-outcome memories play a more prominent role 6,8 . However, the signatures of such learning/relearning and how experience affects them remain unclear.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…"Response" strategies, on the other hand, rely on the learned sequence of motor-actions to reach a goal-location in a given navigational context. It has been shown that the different stages of spatial learning recruit one or the other strategy, with each using its own distinct, associated neural mechanism (see 6 , for a review on VTE and spatial learning). Specifically, lidocaine inactivation of hippocampal neural populations impaired "place" strategies and striatal caudate nucleus inactivation disrupted "response" navigational strategies 7 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human vicarious trial and error is predictive of spatial navigation performance

Santos-Pata

Verschure

2018

Preprint

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When learning new environments, rats often pause at decision points and look back and forth over their possible trajectories as if they were imagining the future outcome of their actions, a behavior termed "Vicarious trial and error" (VTE). As the animal learns the environmental configuration, rats change from deliberative to habitual behavior, and VTE tends to disappear, suggesting a functional relevance in the early stages of learning. Despite the extensive research on spatial navigation, learning and VTE in the rat model, fewer studies have focused on humans. Here, we tested whether head-scanning behaviors that humans typically exhibit during spatial navigation are as predictive of spatial learning as in the rat. Subjects performed a goal-oriented virtual navigation task in a symmetric environment. Spatial learning was assessed through the analysis of trajectories, timings, and head orientations, under habitual and deliberative spatial navigation conditions. As expected, we found that trajectory length and duration decreased with the trial number, implying that subjects learned the spatial configuration of the environment over trials. Interestingly, IdPhi (a standard metric of VTE) also decreased with the trial number, suggesting that humans benefit from the same head-orientation scanning behavior as rats at spatial decision-points. Moreover, IdPhi captured exclusively at the first decision-point of each trial, was correlated with trial trajectory duration and length. Our findings demonstrate that in VTE is a signature of the stage of spatial learning in humans, and can be used to predict performance in navigation tasks with high accuracy.

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Vicarious trial and error

Cited by 414 publications

References 164 publications

Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates

Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates

Model-Based Approaches to Active Perception and Control

Human vicarious trial and error is predictive of spatial navigation performance

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