Topic: anticipatory behaviour

To behave optimally, animals build models of the world based on structural regularities to allow accurate prediction of the value of actions. Although powerful, the computational expense of updating these models limits their usefulness in ever-changing environments. Theoretical models have suggested that a way around these limitations is to separate the representation of structure from the associated value, allowing values to be rapidly updated when necessary. However, it is still unclear how this is implemented in the brain. To address this, we developed an odour-based task that requires mice