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This paper extends the principle of spectroscopy to animal decision-making by modeling choice as angular motion on a landscape, where Fourier components reveal a decision spectrum. The arrangement and symmetry of environmental cues act as a structure factor, imposing selection rules that filter observable harmonics, akin to diffraction. Experiments with various animal species and neural recordings validate these rules, demonstrating how cue geometry tunes the observable decision spectrum and providing evidence for the theory's proposed landscape shape.
Animal decisions are revealed to have a "decision spectrum" governed by symmetry selection rules, turning cue geometry into a tunable spectrometer for behavior.
Spectroscopy reads structure by sending a structured probe into a system and measuring what comes back. Here we apply this principle to animal decision-making. Harmonic Theory casts choice as motion on an angular landscape over heading, whose Fourier components form an animal's decision spectrum. We show that the arrangement of cues enters that landscape as a structure factor, so it factors like a diffraction amplitude, and symmetry imposes selection rules: a p-fold cue array annihilates every harmonic that is not a multiple of p, and sweeping two cues apart draws a notch through each harmonic. Cue geometry becomes a tunable probe: the experimenter sets which harmonics an experiment can see. We read these spectra from public recordings of flies, schooling fish, larval zebrafish, mice and a swimming alga, and from the fly's neural compass, where symmetric scenes suppress the forbidden harmonics and breaking that symmetry restores them. Measuring the compass form factor favours the theory's smooth bump over its square one, and raising cue contrast narrows that bump in every fly. A width fitted to one harmonic then predicts the next. Cue geometry is a spectrometer for decisions, and symmetry sets what it can see.