Probabilistic discrimination of relative stimulus features in mice
| Autor: | Andrea Benucci, Dmitry R. Lyamzin, Ryo Aoki, Mohammad Abdolrahmani |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
genetic structures Computer science media_common.quotation_subject orientation discrimination Decision Making Sensory system Stimulus (physiology) animal behavior probabilistic modeling Task (project management) Mice 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Orientation (mental) Cognitive resource theory Perception Animals Set (psychology) Representation (mathematics) Orientation Spatial media_common Multidisciplinary Perspective (graphical) Representation (systemics) Probabilistic logic Biological Sciences 030104 developmental biology 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Neuroscience Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.2103952118 |
| Popis: | Significance In vision research, oriented gratings are classical stimuli that drive a large population of neurons in the primary visual cortex, but it is unclear whether mice—a recently popular model animal for visual decision-making—can be trained in a task based on the comparison between orientations. Furthermore, it is unclear which strategies they would use and how these strategies would be affected by engagement in the task. Here, we demonstrate that mice can perform a relative orientation discrimination task with high levels of acuity. Using a probabilistic model of choice, we explored the animals’ choice strategies, as well as history biases and their dependency on engagement. During perceptual decision-making, the brain encodes the upcoming decision and the stimulus information in a mixed representation. Paradigms suitable for studying decision computations in isolation rely on stimulus comparisons, with choices depending on relative rather than absolute properties of the stimuli. The adoption of tasks requiring relative perceptual judgments in mice would be advantageous in view of the powerful tools available for the dissection of brain circuits. However, whether and how mice can perform a relative visual discrimination task has not yet been fully established. Here, we show that mice can solve a complex orientation discrimination task in which the choices are decoupled from the orientation of individual stimuli. Moreover, we demonstrate a typical discrimination acuity of 9°, challenging the common belief that mice are poor visual discriminators. We reached these conclusions by introducing a probabilistic choice model that explained behavioral strategies in 40 mice and demonstrated that the circularity of the stimulus space is an additional source of choice variability for trials with fixed difficulty. Furthermore, history biases in the model changed with task engagement, demonstrating behavioral sensitivity to the availability of cognitive resources. In conclusion, our results reveal that mice adopt a diverse set of strategies in a task that decouples decision-relevant information from stimulus-specific information, thus demonstrating their usefulness as an animal model for studying neural representations of relative categories in perceptual decision-making research. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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