导读：美国研究人员发现，面对多种选择时，实验鼠与人一样，具备不错的决策能力。这一结果或可帮助研究人员治疗自闭症患者。
科尔德斯普林实验室对实验鼠加以多种声光刺激，分析这种啮齿类动物面对多重信息时的判断力和决策力。结果显示，实验鼠具备信息分析和认知能力，能够作出逃避威胁的“最佳选择”。
神经学家安妮·丘奇兰德在14日由《神经科学杂志》杂志发表的论文中写道，人类面对多种感官刺激时能够做出最优选择，其他物种是否具备这一能力仍存疑问，“我们的研究是在啮齿类动物中首次发现这种决策力”。
研究人员希望借助对实验鼠的研究，寻找对自闭症患者的疗法。论文写道，研究人员试图打造一个研究自闭症谱系障碍的平台。自闭症谱系障碍是依据典型自闭症核心症状扩展定义的广义自闭症，包括典型自闭症、非典型自闭症、边缘自闭症、疑似自闭症等症状。
面对外界多种感官刺激时，自闭症患者通常无法集中注意力，判断取舍。“我们可以依据实验鼠模型‘打开引擎盖’，”丘奇兰德说，“看看自闭症患者大脑究竟什么地方出现问题。”
丘奇兰德的团队打算下一步研究实验鼠的感官体验和记忆交互能力。
The Cost of Accumulating Evidence in Perceptual Decision Making
Jan Drugowitsch, Rubén Moreno-Bote, Anne K. Churchland, Michael N. Shadlen, and Alexandre Pouget
Decision making often involves the accumulation of information over time, but acquiring information typically comes at a cost. Little is known about the cost incurred by animals and humans for acquiring additional information from sensory variables due, for instance, to attentional efforts. Through a novel integration of diffusion models and dynamic programming, we were able to estimate the cost of making additional observations per unit of time from two monkeys and six humans in a reaction time (RT) random-dot motion discrimination task. Surprisingly, we find that the cost is neither zero nor constant over time, but for the animals and humans features a brief period in which it is constant but increases thereafter. In addition, we show that our theory accurately matches the observed reaction time distributions for each stimulus condition, the time-dependent choice accuracy both conditional on stimulus strength and independent of it, and choice accuracy and mean reaction times as a function of stimulus strength. The theory also correctly predicts that urgency signals in the brain should be independent of the difficulty, or stimulus strength, at each trial.
