Topic: trial history

Learning is not only the acquisition of knowledge, but also the ability to express that knowledge when needed. Previous work using non-reinforced probe trials showed that animals exhibit complete acquisition of stimulus-action associations far before they express them under reinforcement. Why do animals exhibit this gap in performance between acquisition and expression despite already acquiring the stimulus-action associations? Early in learning, animals may (1) exhibit motor biases that they slowly learn to suppress, (2) continue to explore different choice alternatives, or (3) base decisions

When making decisions, animals can employ many strategies, from relying on environmental stimuli to relying on internal biases. The roles of cortical regions in shaping these decision-making strategies remain unclear, often because we lack direct access to these internal variables. Here, we investigated how optogenetic inactivation of 29 motor, sensory, or association cortical regions affects decision-making strategies in 20 mice performing a virtual T-maze task in which they were rewarded for choosing the side with more visual cues. To determine mice’s underlying strategies on any trial, we f

Perceptual memories store our experiences; they are the basis for our understanding the external world and guiding our decisions. Despite fast-paced research in this field, behavioral and cognitive constructs are often custom built around the investigators’ preferred task, and general principles across tasks are still missing. To address these issues, we performed psychophysical experiments aiming to build a computational model comprised of interconnected functional units, each performing a specific task-independent operation. The interaction between units and the readout of the system can be