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Authors & Affiliations
Ines Laranjeira, Matthew Whiteway, International Brain Laboratory, Zach Mainen, Daniel McNamee
Abstract
Individuality is an intrinsic and essential aspect of mammalian behavior that emerges
even in genetically identical organisms experiencing the same environmental conditions1. In the
International Brain Laboratory, over one hundred mice were trained on a visual decision-making
task with the explicit goal of establishing a rigorously standardized experimental protocol. This effort
led to an automated pipeline that produced trained mice whose behavior was indistinguishable
across seven different labs, when considering trial-level descriptors of behavior. Nevertheless,
substantial inter-individual variability was evident in both training time and proficient behavior,
but its nature remains poorly characterized. To address this, we developed a semi-supervised
behavioral segmentation approach to characterize mouse behavior with 100 ms resolution across
multiple variables, including wheel movement velocity, whisker motion energy and licking. This
yielded a discrete space of behavioral syllables which we further analyzed in the context of the trial
structure. Variability in the expression of behavioral syllables was highly non-random, revealing
structure in how different behavioral features co-vary at the sub-trial level. Moreover there were
further indications that mice fell into several clusters, indicative of strategy types or even
mouse personality types. The micro-behavioral structure derived from trained mice was further
informative of differences in learning speed across individual mice, supporting its stability and
biological significance. Overall, these results provide evidence that even in a cohort of mice whose
overt task performance behavior is indistinguishable, there exist latent variables, manifesting in
the details of micro-behavioral features, which appear to explain important aspects of behavioral
individuality