Pombal’s maze: a novel decision making paradigm

Animals have to make decisions constantly: what to eat, where to mate, how to reach that water drop. There is an ongoing debate within the decision-making field about the underlying mechanisms of action selection: is that animals select between what they want, the outcomes, or between what they need to do to get it, the actions? There is both behavior and neural data that supports the hypothesis that competition between potential actions is taking place in motor-related areas while animals are deciding between multiple options to reach a goal. More specifically, it has been hypothesized that action selection relies on a competition mechanism between potential actions, where a bias signal favors one of the actions, leading to its selection.(...