Abstract
Attention – the flexible allocation of processing resources based on behavioural demands – is essential to survival. Mouse research offers unique tools to dissect the underlying pathways, but is hampered by the difficulty of accurately measuring attention in mice. Current attention tasks for mice face several limitations: Binary (hit/miss), temporally imprecise metrics, behavioural confounds and overtraining. Thus, despite the increasing scope of neuronal population measurements, insights are limited without equally precise behavioural measures. Here we present a virtual-environment task for head-fixed mice based on ‘foraging-like’ navigation. The task requires animals to discriminate gratings at orientation differences from 90° to 5°, and can be learned in only 3–5 sessions (<550 trials). It yields single-trial, non-binary metrics of response speed and accuracy, which generate secondary metrics of choice certainty, visual acuity, and most importantly, of sustained and cued attention – two attentional components studied extensively in humans. This allows us to examine single-trial dynamics of attention in mice, independently of confounds like rule learning. With this approach, we show that C57/BL6 mice have better visual acuity than previously measured, that they rhythmically alternate between states of high and low alertness, and that they can be prompted to adopt different performance strategies using minute changes in reward contingencies.
Highlights
Attention – the ability to flexibly allocate processing resources based on behavioural demands – is a crucial survival mechanism, and its neuronal underpinnings in health and disease have been subject to extensive research
By optimizing the training process, and by tracking a range of performance metrics trial-by-trial, our task meets several goals not achieved by previous paradigms
By tapping into innate foraging behaviour, it manages to deliver these metrics within drastically reduced training times, and without the need for specific ‘attention task’ training
Summary
Attention – the ability to flexibly allocate processing resources based on behavioural demands – is a crucial survival mechanism, and its neuronal underpinnings in health and disease have been subject to extensive research. Most attention tasks currently available for mice were originally developed in the context of behavioural and clinical research rather than systems neuroscience. As such, they quantify clinically relevant aspects of attentive behaviour in a standardized way, often in an environment (e.g. an operant conditioning box) optimized for high-throughput training of animals. Animals need to constantly monitor potential target locations, making the 5CSRTT a test of Sustained Attention in terms of the ANT framework. The widespread adoption of these tasks in mice can be attributed to the way they circumvent cognitive limitations that are essentially unrelated to attention: Functions like behavioural flexibility, memory, reward and punishment learning, as well as the ability to inhibit actions, are all quite restricted in mice. Apart from simple rule memorization (‘Respond when a target appears’), sustained-attention tasks rely largely on stimulus detection, placing a low load on other cognitive resources like memory
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