Abstract
To adapt to the environment and survive, most animals can control their behaviors by making decisions. The process of decision-making and responding according to cues in the environment is stable, sustainable, and learnable. Understanding how behaviors are regulated by neural circuits and the encoding and decoding mechanisms from stimuli to responses are important goals in neuroscience. From results observed in Drosophila experiments, the underlying decision-making process is discussed, and a neural circuit that implements a two-choice decision-making model is proposed to explain and reproduce the observations. Compared with previous two-choice decision making models, our model uses synaptic plasticity to explain changes in decision output given the same environment. Moreover, biological meanings of parameters of our decision-making model are discussed. In this paper, we explain at the micro-level (i.e., neurons and synapses) how observable decision-making behavior at the macro-level is acquired and achieved.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by NSFC project (Project No.61375122), and in part by Shanghai Science and Technology Development Funds (Grant Nos. 13dz2260200, 135115 04300). We thank LetPub (www.letpub.com) and Accdon for their linguistic assistance during the preparation of this manuscript. The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper.
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Wei, H., Bu, Y. & Dai, D. A decision-making model based on a spiking neural circuit and synaptic plasticity. Cogn Neurodyn 11, 415–431 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-017-9436-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-017-9436-2