Numerical averaging in mice
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Numerical averaging in mice Ezgi Gür1,2 · Yalçın Akın Duyan1,3 · Fuat Balcı1,2 Received: 28 June 2020 / Revised: 13 October 2020 / Accepted: 22 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Rodents can be trained to associate different durations with different stimuli (e.g., light/sound). When the associated stimuli are presented together, maximal responding is observed around the average of individual durations (akin to averaging). The current study investigated whether mice can also average independently trained numerosities. Mice were initially trained to make 10 or 20 lever presses on a single (run) lever to obtain a reward and each fixed-ratio schedule was signaled either with an auditory or visual stimulus. Then, mice were trained to press another lever to obtain the reward after they responded on the run lever for the minimum number of presses [Fixed Consecutive Number (FCN)-10 or -20 trials] signaled by the corresponding discriminative stimulus. Following this training, FCN trials with the compound stimulus were introduced to test the counting behavior of mice when they encountered conflicting information regarding the number of responses required to obtain the reward. Our results showed that the numbers of responses on these compound test trials were around the average of the number of responses in FCN-10 and FCN-20 trials particularly when the auditory stimulus was associated with a fewer number of required responses. The counting strategy explained the behavior of the majority of the mice in the FCN-Compound test trials (as opposed to the timing strategy). The number of responses in FCN-Compound trials was accounted for equally well by the arithmetic, geometric, and Bayesian averages of the number of responses observed in FCN-10 and FCN-20 trials. Keywords Averaging · Counting · Cue integration · Mice · Number · Numerosity
Introduction When cues that signal conflicting information are presented together, many organisms are known to integrate cues such that the resulting judgment/percept represents the weighted average of the different information signaled by individual cues (Battaglia et al. 2003; De Corte and Matell 2016a; Johnston 1994; Wystrach et al. 2015). This empirical observation is referred to as “sensory cue integration” in the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01444-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Fuat Balcı [email protected] 1
Timing and Decision‑Making Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Koç University, Rumelifeneri Yolu, Sarıyer, 34450 Istanbul, Turkey
2
Research Center for Translational Medicine, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
3
Department of Psychology, MEF University, Istanbul, Turkey
sensory domain. Interestingly, the weighing of individual sources of information (e.g., spatial localization based on conflicting visual and auditory cues) is proportional to the reliability of the individual s
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