Topic: motif emergence

In natural settings, animals navigate richly-structured sensory surroundings and rapidly adapt to changes in these surroundings. While many studies have explored navigation in mazes and open arenas, relatively little is known about how animals navigate in terrain that lacks defined routes and is too complex to trivially memorize. Here, we probe the structure of mouse behavior in a complex, reconfigurable 3D arena in darkness and without explicit reinforcement. Within the first several hours, mice quickly explore the whole arena and converge on a sparse set of running and jumping paths. Surpris