Diurnal rhythms of choice: a novel state-dependent drift diffusion model uncovers time-dependent changes in rat decision making

Abstract

2Time-of-day severely impacts human decision-making, with real-world consequences. Studying shifts in decision-making strategy requires controlled, long timescale behavioral measurement and analyses that can extract insight from time-varying behavior. We introduce two complementary advances to address this gap: an autonomous 24-hour training facility for continuous behavioral measurement during decision-making and an interpretable modeling framework that captures non-stationary decision dynamics from reaction times and choices. Rats were trained on a visual evidence accumulation task across months, generating over a half million trials spanning the circadian period. Our model revealed latent behavioral states characterized by distinct evidence accumulation parameters, including differences in drift rate, bias, and decision-commitment time. These states recur across days and align with feeding schedules and the light-dark cycle, producing periodic fluctuations in performance over 24 hours. Together, these results demonstrate how continuous behavioral sampling combined with generative modeling uncovers long-timescale structure in decision-making obscured by stationary analyses. 1 HIGHLIGHTSO_LI24-hour live-in operant system allows autonomous training in cognitive tasks across months C_LIO_LI24-hour measurements reveal that rat performance fluctuates with time of day C_LIO_LINovel DDM-HMM framework identifies reaction time and accuracy shifts across multiple timescales C_LIO_LIDDM-HMM captures serial dependence in decisions that classic models ignore C_LI