The ability to imagine past events and simulate future ones is a profound human ability, and highly useful to artists, philosophers, scientists, and engineers. Are animals also able to use mental imagery to represent their world and experiences? Previous NSF-funded research from the principal investigator has found evidence that rats form mental images of expected absent events. The proposed research builds on this by asking how can rats use mental imagery to reason, and how do imagined events impact new learning? Many creatures face situations in the real world in which the ability to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty would be adaptive. This work can provide insights into how brains think, and how the human mind is unique versus how it is similar to the minds of other animals. This research could inform the design of artificial intelligence systems to learn and make decisions under conditions of incomplete information. Broader educational impacts include the involvement of high-school and college students as research interns.
Humans are rational, causal agents. Blaisdell and his colleagues have recently discovered that, like humans, rats engage in a variety of rational processes involving causality. They make rational causal inferences from their interventions and represent unobservable events, such as a hidden cause, as possibly being present when presented with associated events. That is, they appear to have some form of mental imagery. Rational decision making guided by mental imagery involves the recruitment of the same neural circuits (i.e., the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) that are involved in human reasoning under ambiguous situations, and that requires pattern completion from partial information. This proposal investigates the theoretical and empirical foundations of rational decision making that are integral to human reasoning and their evolutionary antecedents and progenitors by seeking for commonalities in a phylogenetically-distant mammalian relative. Behavioral experiments use operant and Pavlovian conditioning procedures to establish associations between events. Tests of decision making will be made by presenting one of the events and observing behavior when the associated event is uncovered and therefore explicitly absent, or covered by an opaque shield and therefore ambiguously absent. This research will deepen our understanding of the mental capacities of mammalian animals which may offer insights into the likely brain mechanisms involved in reasoning. Mental imagery is a basic process in human learning and memory. Establishing evidence for mental imagery in animal learning and memory can provide insights into which aspects of human cognition are unique to humans, and which aspects of human cognition are homologies shared with nonhuman animals, and could inform the design of artificial intelligence.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
