Absolutely thrilled to share my postdoc work in the Axel lab. We found odor-evoked representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex and showed that mice desire knowledge as its own reward. Now on bioRxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... - ThreadSky

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jenbussell.bsky.social • 505 days ago

Absolutely thrilled to share my postdoc work in the Axel lab. We found odor-evoked representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex and showed that mice desire knowledge as its own reward. Now on bioRxiv! https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.13.562291v1

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jenbussell.bsky.social•505 days ago

First, HUGE, HUGE thanks to my co-authors and mentors
@ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social Christian Marton, Ethan Bromberg-Martin, Larry Abbott, and Richard Axel

jenbussell.bsky.social•505 days ago

Are mice curious? Like humans, monkeys, birds, and rats, do they have an innate desire for knowledge, even if it offers them no external benefit?

jenbussell.bsky.social•505 days ago

Yes! We developed a novel information seeking task for mice, in which odors offer them the opportunity to receive information (via other odors) about whether they will receive a water reward.

jenbussell.bsky.social•505 days ago

Even though the information does not let the thirsty mice get more water, they still choose to receive it. In fact, they are even willing to pay for this information by giving up water reward.

jenbussell.bsky.social•505 days ago

In modeling their decisions as value-based reinforcement learning-like computations, we found that we needed to account for the mice updating both the water and information value of the choice options separately.

jenbussell.bsky.social•505 days ago

These results all show that mice value information that resolves their uncertainty about what is going to happen (in this case, getting water reward) even though it doesn't offer them any external benefit.