Professor finds mice assess risk better than humans

Imagine that all too familiar dilemma between deciding to rush for the bus or to miss it and stand in the cold.
Professor Charles Gallistel, co-director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, along with graduate student Fuat Balci recently published a three-year study of how well humans and mice are at assessing risk, according to a press release.
“[Mice] are as good as humans, slightly better [at assessing risk],” Gallistel said.
The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health to see if most humans and mice can accurately assess the risks of the situations and reason about them appropriately so they can choose the time to act in the light of the risks, he said.
Risk assessment is an essential skill to possess, especially in a time of recession and a significantly decreasing number of student loans offered by banks, Gallistel said.
“The ability of humans to assess risks and choose appropriately is an area of intensive study by psychologists, economists and scientists of various kinds,” he said. “Humans systematically miscalculate the risk and make choices that do not optimize their expected gain.”
Gallistel said people do not assess risk accurately.
 “They don’t know how small one chance in 10 million is. In other words, they don’t internally represent the quantitative area properly,” he said.
The comparison of mice to men offered the team an alternative to simply tracking human reaction to risk. The accessibility of mice opened the research doors for the team, Gallistel said.
“Humans were always interesting, but mice are great because we can keep them for long [periods of] time doing one task over and over, plus they’re cheap and portable,” said Daniel Greene, a Rutgers College junior.
The human subjects were required to watch a video screen with a control, in which holding the “V” key would move a virtual basket to the left and the “B” key would move it to the right, Gallistel said. Soon after, a ball would appear and fall; the subjects were rewarded if they caught the ball and punished if they let it drop or had the basket in the wrong location.
This procedure references the natural risk assessment process, he said.
“We think that people’s brains are made to assess risk all the time,” Gallistel said.

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