Behavioral Task for Mice
We have developed a sophisticated behavioral task for studying perceptual decision-making in mice (Burgess et al, Cell Reports, 2017), in which mice are trained to turn a steering wheel in response to visual stimuli. This task is carefully constructed to allow for quantitative measurement of the subject's visual perception and decision biases using models that we previously developed (Sridharan et al., J of Vision, 2014). The task is ideal for measuring the effects of brain manipulations on behavior, and for studying the relationship between neural activity and behavior.
Hardware designs and software for running this task are available on the lab website.
A three-alternative visual discrimination task for mice. Top, the task rule: to select the grating of higher contrast, or nogo when no grating is present. Bottom, example psychometric curves from one subject, fit with a logistic regression model.
References
- Burgess CP*, Lak A*, Steinmetz NA*, Zatka-Haas P*, et al., "High-Yield Methods for Accurate Two-Alternative Visual Psychophysics in Head-Fixed Mice", Cell Reports (2017)
- Sridharan D, Steinmetz NA, Moore T, Knudsen EI, "Distinguishing bias from sensitivity effects in multialternative detection tasks", J. of Vision (2014)