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(Medical Xpress) — Regardless of an organism’s biological complexity, every encephalized animal continuously makes under-informed behavioral choices that can have serious consequences. Despite its ubiquity, however, there’s a long-standing question about its neurological basis – namely, whether these choices are made through probabilistic world models constructed by the brain, or by reinforcement of learned associations. Recently, however, scientists in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University found that reinforcement cannot account for the rapidity with which mice modify their behavior when the chance of a given phenomenon changes. The researchers say this indicates that mice may have primordially-evolved neural capabilities to represent likelihood and perform calculations that optimize their resulting behavior – and therefore that such genetic mechanisms can be investigated and manipulated by genetic and other procedures.