An accumulation-of-evidence task using visual pulses for mice navigating in virtual reality
| Autor: | Lucas Pinto, Sue A. Koay, Ben Engelhard, Alice M. Yoon, Ben Deverett, Stephan Y. Thiberge, Ilana B. Witten, David W. Tank, Carlos D. Brody |
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| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
Computer science Cognitive Neuroscience evidence accumulation spatial navigation Sensory system Stimulus (physiology) Virtual reality Spatial memory decision making lcsh:RC321-571 Behavioral Neuroscience 03 medical and health sciences Cognitive variables 0302 clinical medicine lcsh:Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry mouse Original Research 030304 developmental biology 0303 health sciences behavior Single pulse Stereotypy (non-human) Visual evidence 030104 developmental biology Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Perceptual decision virtual reality 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Neuroscience Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol 12 (2018) |
| DOI: | 10.1101/232702 |
| Popis: | The gradual accumulation of sensory evidence is a crucial component of perceptual decision making, but its neural mechanisms are still poorly understood. Given the wide availability of genetic and optical tools for mice, they can be useful model organisms for the study of these phenomena; however, behavioral tools are largely lacking. Here, we describe a new evidence-accumulation task for head-fixed mice navigating in a virtual reality environment. As they navigate down the stem of a virtual T-maze, they see brief pulses of visual evidence on either side, and retrieve a reward on the arm with the highest number of pulses. The pulses occur randomly with Poisson statistics, yielding a diverse yet well-controlled stimulus set, making the data conducive to a variety of computational approaches. A large number of mice of different genotypes were able to learn and consistently perform the task, at levels similar to rats in analogous tasks. They are sensitive to side differences of a single pulse, and their memory of the cues is stable over time. Moreover, using non-parametric as well as modeling approaches, we show that the mice indeed accumulate evidence: they use multiple pulses of evidence from throughout the cue region of the maze to make their decision, albeit with a small overweighting of earlier cues, and their performance is affected by the magnitude but not the duration of evidence. Additionally, analysis of the mice's running patterns revealed that trajectories are fairly stereotyped yet modulated by the amount of sensory evidence, suggesting that the navigational component of this task may provide a continuous readout correlated to the underlying cognitive variables. Our task, which can be readily integrated with state-of-the-art techniques, is thus a valuable tool to study the circuit mechanisms and dynamics underlying perceptual decision making, particularly under more complex behavioral contexts. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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