Economic and social modulations of innate decision-making in mice exposed to visual threats.

Threat intensity primarily drives innate decision-making in mice, with dominant individuals showing increased vigilance and risk aversion, as revealed by a new computational model.

• Why it matters: Understanding how innate decisions are influenced by social and environmental factors is crucial for comprehending survival strategies and behavioral flexibility in animals.
• What they did: Researchers developed a behavioral paradigm involving threat, reward, and social hierarchy variables, classifying defensive responses into four types using machine learning, and modeled decision processes with a drift-diffusion leaky integrator.
• The result: Findings demonstrate that threat intensity dominates decision bias, social hierarchy modulates vigilance and risk behavior, and the computational model elucidates how these factors interact to shape innate responses.