Topic: behavioral variability

Learning occurs in the context of individual prior experience. Variability in learning is, therefore, due to both differences in learning capacity as well as differences in those prior experiences. To describe the effect of prior experience on learning and to identify how the brain transfers this prior experience for current learning, we measured the behavior of many rats across two tasks on a six-arm track. In the first, reward was delivered after any transition between arms. In the second, reward was only delivered at three arms (2-3-4). To receive reward, it was necessary to alternate betwe

During naturalistic foraging, animals deploy complex decision-making strategies to acquire resources in the presence of uncertain environments. Here we focus on a probabilistic foraging task and how serotonergic (5-HT) neuromodulation affects mouse performance via optogenetic activation of the Dorsal Raphae nucleus (DRN). We show that it is necessary to account for the complexity of behavioral variability across mice in order to uncover the strategies mice deploy to perform the task and how serotonergic neuromodulation affects behavior. While most studies have quantified decision-making perfor