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Humans tend to find ways to keep themselves motivated and happy. What about animals? Do they feel down and look for new ways to motivate themselves?

time__traveller_
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    "Animals" is an incredibly, incredibly broad category. It's unclear to me whether many of them have "motivation" at all except in a anthropomorphic manner. – Bryan Krause Aug 12 '21 at 16:15
  • I'm also unclear what constitutes "find ways to keep themselves motivated and happy". Animals play, are curious, explore, problem-solve, seek social contact, mate, reproduce, and many other behaviors that humans do for motivation and happiness. – Arnon Weinberg Aug 13 '21 at 20:56

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I’m not an expert on this subject but, if we take the term of prediction errors and apply it to the animals (at least most of them) that may make sense.

The key element is probably "foraging" in this case. The brain itself drives (with the reward system of course) to animals for finding new ways for gathering food. In their umwelt, food sources are dispersed, unreliable in terms of availability, unreliable in terms of quality and quantity, and all too often snatched up by a faster-moving organism in terms of competition.

So animal needs to update its predictions to getting food. Predictions that are updated can lead to more successful interactions between the animal and its ever-changing environment.

As a result, understanding new perceptual aspects of an unexpected stimulus and assessing whether the surprise was better or worse than predicted may be critical for directing future behaviors. And of course, dopaminergic pathways in the brain support this process. Schultz, 2010; Bromberg-Martin et al, 2010. Moreover, the same neurons change their firing rates in different directions to express the presence of an unexpected reward and the absence of an expected reward. Hyde et al, 2015

AltunE
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