Topic: cortical and subcortical brain areas

Animals adapt their behaviour to novel situations, quickly learning to respond appropriately to external stimuli. While different brain areas are thought to make distinct contributions to goal-directed behaviour, it remains unclear how the brain as a network of areas enables goal-directed learning. Here, we developed a behavioural paradigm that allows us to probe rapid reward-based sensorimotor learning in mice, overcoming the limitations of longitudinal recordings. Mice are first pretrained on an auditory detection task and, once expert, are transferred to a whisker-based tactile detection ta