Sunk cost sensitivity during change-of-mind decisions is informed by both the spent and remaining costs.

Sunk cost sensitivity describes escalating decision commitment with increased spent resources. On neuroeconomic foraging tasks, mice, rats, and humans show similar escalations from sunk costs while quitting an ongoing countdown to reward. In a new analysis taken across computationally parallel foraging tasks across species and laboratories, we find that these behaviors primarily occur on choices that are economically inconsistent with the subject's other choices, and that they reflect not only the time spent, but also the time remaining, suggesting that these are change-of-mind re-evaluation processes.

Vicarious Trial-and-Error Is Enhanced During Deliberation in Human Virtual Navigation in a Translational Foraging Task.

Foraging tasks provide valuable insights into decision-making as animals decide how to allocate limited resources (such as time). In rodents, vicarious trial-and-error (back and forth movements), or VTE, is an important behavioral measure of deliberation which is enhanced early in learning and when animals are presented with difficult decisions. Using new translational versions of a rodent foraging task (the "Movie Row" and "Candy Row"), humans navigated a virtual maze presented on standard computers to obtain rewards (either short videos or candy) offered after a variable delay.

Mindfulness and decision making: sunk costs or escalation of commitment?

Mindfulness is related to a number of positive health outcomes, such as decreased stress, anxiety and improved physical functioning. Recent studies have found that mindfulness is related to a range of cognitive outcomes, including better decision making. In one example, higher trait mindfulness and brief mindfulness inductions are associated with resistance to the influence of sunk costs, where mindful individuals were more willing to discontinue a costly, but disadvantageous, course of action.

A Low-Cost Morris Water Maze for Undergraduate Research: Construction and Demonstration in a Rat Model of Obesity-Induced Diabetes.

The Morris Water Maze (MWM) is a standard task for assessing hippocampal-dependent learning and memory, but the cost of commercial versions of the task may be prohibitive for some undergraduate research projects. We describe the construction of a low-cost MWM for use with rodents and demonstrate the effectiveness of the MWM in a study of the effect of diet-induced obesity on cognitive function in rats. Previous studies have described an impairment in MWM performance in rats fed a high-fat diet combined with streptozotocin injection (to model Type 2 diabetes).

Post-training cocaine administration facilitates habit learning and requires the infralimbic cortex and dorsolateral striatum.

Human drug addiction is a complex disorder, in which exogenous substances are able to recruit and maintain behaviors involved in drug taking. Many drugs that are addictive in humans are able to act on natural brain systems for learning and memory, and while many memory systems may be affected by addictive drugs, work with operant tasks has shown that addictive drugs (e.g.