Title: Mice factor the cost of time when waiting for reward

Spending time efficiently when searching for and collecting resources confers an advantage for survival. Reward-maximizing decisions involve correctly weighing how much time to invest in the pursuit of delayed rewards against the cost of time spent away from other sources of reward. Curiously, humans and other animals display a specific pattern of decision-making– investing too little time in some situations and too much time in others– that is suboptimal. We seek to understand the decision-making algorithms and representations of time in the brain that underlie these time-investment decisions. In this study, we are addressing these questions by measuring give-up behavior in mice while recording from hippocampal neurons in order to examine both the behavioral and neural signatures of these algorithms and temporal representations.