Biology subjects

Urai, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Urai, A..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

A standardized and reproducible method to measure decision-making in mice

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 designed a task for head-fixed mice that combines established assays of 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 successfully 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 towards achieving reproducibility in neuroscience through collaborative open-science approaches.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Task-evoked pupil responses reflect internal belief states

Perceptual decisions about the state of the environment are often made in the face of uncertain evidence. Internal uncertainty signals are considered important regulators of learning and decision-making. A growing body of work has implicated the brains arousal systems in uncertainty signaling. Here, we found that two specific computational variables, postulated by recent theoretical work, evoke boosts of arousal at different times during a perceptual decision: decision confidence (the observers internally estimated probability that a choice was correct given the evidence) before feedback, and prediction errors (deviations from expected reward) after feedback. We monitored pupil diameter, a peripheral marker of central arousal state, while subjects performed a challenging perceptual choice task with a delayed monetary reward. We quantified evoked pupil responses during decision formation and after reward-linked feedback. During both intervals, decision difficulty and accuracy had interacting effects on pupil responses. Pupil responses negatively scaled with decision confidence prior to feedback and scaled with uncertainty-dependent prediction errors after feedback. This pattern of pupil responses during both intervals was in line with a model using the observers graded belief about choice accuracy to anticipate rewards and compute prediction errors. We conclude that pupil-linked arousal systems are modulated by internal belief states.

neuroscience↗