Social interaction is not necessary for learning reciprocal altruism in rats trained on the Iterated Prisoner?s Dilemma.

G. E. DELMAS; M. T. MARINO; S. E. LEW; B. S. ZANUTTO

San Diego California

Congreso; Neuroscience 2018; 2018

Sociedad de Neurociencias

AbstractReciprocal altruism is a behavior for which non-related individuals favor others in detriment of their own benefit. What a subject lose for favoring another is rewarded by the reciprocity of another individual. In this way in the long term, the strategy that gives the greatest reward is to cooperate. Triver?s theory of reciprocal altruism is able to explain how natural selection favors reciprocal altruism (reciprocity) among non-related individuals, but there is a controversy about the mechanisms behind this kind of behavior. While reciprocal altruism has been proven in monkeys by the Iterated Prisoner?s Dilemma (iPD), birds and rats failed to reach high levels of cooperation. In our previous work, we have shown that by using positive and negative reinforcements and an appropriate contrast between rewards in a iPD framework, rats were able to learn reciprocal altruism with high mutual cooperation. In the payoff matrix, pellets and timeout were the positive and the negative reinforcement, respectively. In that experiments there were two subjects, the experimental and the opponent. Here the opponent was replaced by a lighting stimulus. We found that rats learned reciprocal altruism behavior with high level of mutual cooperation as in the previous experiments with an animal opponent . Without any doubt, social interactions are important, but here we showed that in the learning of reciprocal altruism under the use of the prisoner´s dilemma paradigm, those interactions are not necessary.Abstract Citation