Aversive view memories and risk perception in navigating ants

Many ants establish foraging routes through learning views of the visual panorama. Route models have focused primarily on attractive view use, which experienced foragers orient towards to return to known sites. However, aversive views have recently been uncovered as a key component of route learning. Here, Cataglyphis velox rapidly learned aversive views, when associated with a negative outcome, a period of captivity in vegetation, triggering increases in hesitation behavior. These memories were based on the accumulation of experiences over multiple trips with each new experience regulating forager hesitancy. Foragers were also sensitive to captivity time differences, suggesting they possess some mechanism to quantify duration. Finally, we analyzed foragers' perception of risky (i.e. variable) versus stable aversive outcomes by associating two sites along the route with distinct captivity schedules, a fixed or variable duration, with the same mean across training. Foragers exhibited fewer hesitations in response to risky outcomes compared to fixed ones, indicating they perceived risky outcomes as less severe. Results align with a logarithmic relationship between captivity duration and hesitations, suggesting that aversive stimulus perception is a logarithm of its actual value. We discuss how aversive view learning could be executed within the mushroom bodies circuitry following a prediction error rule.

A Probit Model for Estimating the Effect of Complexity on Risk Taking

This study was designed to explore the risk strategy employed in complex settings by conducting an empirical analysis of 1212 decisions made in the UK offcourse betting market. The decision-making environment chosen for the study is identified as offering the advantages of a naturalistic setting and providing scope for observing risk strategy in a range of alternative- and attribute-based complexity conditions. Specifically, the investigation employs a probit model to test the hypothesis that increasing either attribute- or alternative-based complexity results in the employment of a strategy more averse to risk-taking. The results suggest that this is the case and that complexity associated with alternatives has a particularly significant effect on the way bettors respond to the existence of risk. It is observed that these findings corroborate earlier studies of decision processes and decision outcomes.

The Nature and Role of Complexity in Simulation Performance

The objective of this study is to understand the nature and role of complexity in simulation performance. In order to do this, a system dynamics model of the product development pipeline was developed, and an online game based on that model was created. An experiment was run where subject made a series of decisions on one or two variables for many periods, with different levels of information available to them (attribute complexity). Hypotheses were proposed based on the literature. The results confirmed the hypotheses relating degree of difficulty to distance from optimality. Two factors adversely affected the subjects' performance: dealing with more complex information on performance (more than one attribute) and having to make more than one simultaneous decision, i.e. more than one decision per period. The latter condition was more detrimental to performance than the former.