Evidence for Sequential Decision Making in the Medicinal Leech

Evidence for sequential decision making in the medicinal leech.

Decision making can be a complex task involving a sequence of subdecisions. For example, we decide to pursue a goal (e.g., get something to eat), then decide how to accomplish that goal (e.g., go to a restaurant), and then make a sequence of more specific plans (e.g., which restaurant to go to, how to get there, what to order, etc.). In characterizing the effects of stimulating individual brain...

Statistics of decision making in the leech.

Animals continuously decide among different behaviors, but, even in invertebrates, the mechanisms underlying choice and decision are unknown. In this article, leech spontaneous behavior was tracked and quantified for up to 12 h. We obtained a statistical characterization, in space and time domains, of the decision processes underlying selection of behavior in the leech. We found that the spatia...

Decision-Making in the Leech Nervous System1

SYNOPSIS. Previous models of behavioral choice have described two types of hierarchy, a decision hierarchy, in which different classes of decisions are made at each level (Tinbergen, 1951), and a behavioral hierarchy, in which one behavior will take precedence over others (Davis, 1985). Most experimental work on the neuronal basis of decision-making has focussed on the latter of these: a behavi...

Convergence in a sequential two stages decision making process

We analyze a sequential decision making process, in which at each stepthe decision is made in two stages. In the rst stage a partially optimalaction is chosen, which allows the decision maker to learn how to improveit under the new environment. We show how inertia (cost of changing)may lead the process to converge to a routine where no further changesare made. We illustrate our scheme with some...

The Use of Evidence by Decision-Making Committees