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["Andrew Hund" <axh69 AT po.cwru.edu>]

http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/techscience/story/0,4386,257168,00.html
      MONKEYS assign value in much the way humans do when making economic
choices, a study to be published in the journal Science found.

      The monkeys played a game in which they chose a red or green circle,
the study said. The monkeys were sporadically given a reward of juice, and
they had to adjust their decision-making as the results changed
unpredictably over the rounds.

      After observing tens of thousands of monkey games, Stanford University
professor Leo Sugrue and colleagues determined that monkeys used a strategy
that considers the reward from past choices and estimates the likelihood of
a reward when picking red or green.

      This thought process is similar to how an investor looks at investment
performance and chooses where to place his money, the study said.

      The study found monkeys made their choices and tracked the value of
each decision from round to round in a part of the brain called the parietal
cortex.

      Economists and psychologists know people use experiences about rewards
to make decisions, the study found, though 'we know very little about how a
healthy human brain operates,' Prof Sugrue said.

      Understanding how the brain actually assigns and tracks value is
important because many psychiatric disorders stem from an inability to
correctly assess options, he said. -- Bloomberg

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