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On the subject, a dear colleague shares this article written by Patrick Kurp, published in the press release section of the Rice University (RU) website in Huston, TX and translated by us for this space. Let's see what it's all about...
While searching for food, animals, including humans and monkeys, continuously make decisions about where to look for food and when to move between potential sources of sustenance.
“Food-seeking behavior is something we do every day when we go to the supermarket to buy food, and we make decisions based on the degree of reward provided by each choice. It's a classic problem common to all species on the planet,” said Valentin Dragoi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University (RU), professor of neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College and scientific director of the Methodist/Rice Center for Neural Systems Restoration.
In an article published in Nature Neuroscience, Dragoi and his collaborators investigate the brain processes involved in the search for food.
“In this study, we describe the use of a new integrated wireless system to record brain activity in the frontal areas of the brain and for oculomotor and behavioral monitoring. We examine in real time how this omnipresent task of searching for food unfolds, which is something we naturally do every day,” said Dragoi.
Macaques are a genus of monkeys native to Asia, North Africa and Southern Europe (Gibraltar). They most often eat fruits, seeds and other plant-based foods. “We studied macaques,” Dragoi said, “because foraging for food is a natural behavior and the macaque brain is quite similar to the human brain in terms of organization and function.”
Until now, it was difficult to examine the neural basis of foraging in natural environments because previous approaches relied on immobilized animals performing evidence-based foraging tasks. Dragoi and his research partners allowed free macaques to freely interact with reward options while wirelessly recording neural activity in their prefrontal cortex.
“The animals decided when and where to look for food based on whether their reward predictions met or not. The predictions were not based solely on a history of delivering rewards, but also on the understanding that waiting longer improves the chances of getting a reward,” Dragoi said.
The results indicate that foraging strategies are based on a cortical model of reward dynamics when animals freely explore their environment.
“We learned that we can predict choices even in complex situations simply by reading the responses of dozens of neurons in the frontal lobe. This can potentially move in the direction of prosthetic devices to influence or bias the choice, even in a non-invasive way. More fundamentally, it allows us to understand how the brain works when it performs this natural behavior,” Dragoi said.
Next, the Dragoi laboratory will combine the search for food in a social context and record two animals simultaneously as they cooperate to search for food as a reward. This is an enormous technical challenge, but Dragoi believes that he and his research partners are close to achieving those goals. This may allow a solution to the challenge of cortical implants to help patients with brain dysfunction and allow them to make behavioral decisions.
The lead author of the article is Neda Shahidi, who studied her doctorate in Dragoi's laboratory and is currently a group leader at the Georg-Elias-Müller-Institute for Psychology, Georg August-Universität, Göttingen.
