Abstract
Progress in science requires standardized assays whose results can be readily shared, compared, and reproduced across laboratories. Reproducibility, however, has been a concern in neuroscience, particularly for measurements of mouse behavior. Here, we show that a standardized task to probe decision-making in mice produces reproducible results across multiple laboratories. We adopted a task for head-fixed mice that assays perceptual and value-based decision making, and we standardized training protocol and experimental hardware, software, and procedures. We trained 140 mice across seven laboratories in three countries, and we collected 5 million mouse choices into a publicly available database. Learning speed was variable across mice and laboratories, but once training was complete there were no significant differences in behavior across laboratories. Mice in different laboratories adopted similar reliance on visual stimuli, on past successes and failures, and on estimates of stimulus prior probability to guide their choices. These results reveal that a complex mouse behavior can be reproduced across multiple laboratories. They establish a standard for reproducible rodent behavior, and provide an unprecedented dataset and open-access tools to study decision-making in mice. More generally, they indicate a path toward achieving reproducibility in neuroscience through collaborative open-science approaches.
Highlights
Progress in science depends on reproducibility and requires standardized assays whose methods and results can be readily shared, compared, and reproduced across laboratories (Baker, 2016; Ioannidis, 2005)
We established an open-access data architecture pipeline (Bonacchi et al, 2020) and use it to release the >5 million mouse choices at data.internationalbrainlab.org. These results reveal that a complex mouse behavior can be successfully reproduced across laboratories, enabling collaborative studies of brain function in behaving mice
The dependence on history- was modulated by confidence in the previous trial Figure 5—figure supplement 1c (Lak et al, 2020a; Mendonca et al, 2018). These effects were generally consistent across laboratories. These results reveal that a complex mouse behavior can be successfully reproduced across laboratories, and more generally suggest a path toward improving reproducibility in neuroscience
Summary
Progress in science depends on reproducibility and requires standardized assays whose methods and results can be readily shared, compared, and reproduced across laboratories (Baker, 2016; Ioannidis, 2005) Such assays are common in fields such as astronomy (Fish et al, 2016; Abdalla et al, 2018), physics (CERN Education, Communications and Outreach Group, 2018), genetics (Dickinson et al, 2016), and medicine (Bycroft et al, 2018), and perhaps rarer in fields such as sociology (Camerer et al, 2018) and psychology (Forscher et al, 2020; Frank et al, 2017; Makel et al, 2012). This difficulty is not due to genetic variation: behavioral variability is as large in inbred mice as in outbred mice (Tuttle et al, 2018)
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