B.W. Brunton, M.M. Botvinick, and C.D. Brody, Rats and Humans can Optimally Accumulate Evidence for Decision-Making Science 340:95-98 (2013). This paper describes the “Poisson Clicks” task, a decision-making task which is particularly well-suited to detailed quantitative modeling. Using this task together with a trial-by-trial model of the behavior, Bing showed that rats, like humans, can gradually accumulate evidence for decision-making, and that the evidence accumulator of both species is optimal in the sense of being noiseless and lossless.A story about it, including an audio podcast, was written for the Princeton University web home page, and got picked up in a variety of lay press, including the Daily Mail in Britain.
