Ghani, Naureen;
(2025)
False Starts, Wrong Turns, and Dead Ends.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Animals communicate their choices through movement in decision-making tasks. While previous research has focused on movement endpoints, such as reaction time and speed, less is known about how movement evolves prior to decisions. Our study examines the movement trajectories of mice in experiments conducted by the International Brain Laboratory. We aim to understand how these movement trajectories reflect the internal state and behavioral strategies of mice. In a visual perceptual decision-making task, head-fixed mice were trained to use a steering wheel to center a visual stimulus presented to the left or right. We discovered that mice make quick, decisive wheel movements to maximize reward rate. These movements indicated high levels of task engagement. In addition, there were equal proportions of mice that showed a preference to move the wheel clockwise or counterclockwise throughout these rapid movements. During difficult low visual contrast trials, some mice developed an uninstructed strategy: they wiggled the wheel to enhance visual stimulus detection prior to making a quick, decisive movement. We call this the “sample-then-swipe” strategy. We also observed that some mice did false starts and moved the wheel prior to the visual stimulus onset in anticipation of reward. By analyzing these movement trajectories, we were able to distinguish high-performing mice from low-performing mice. While high-performing mice wiggled the wheel to improve detection of low visual contrast stimuli, low-performing mice wiggled the wheel due to reduced task engagement. High-performing mice did a slight amount of false starts (<10%), but low-performing mice did a substantial amount of false starts (>40%). The primary contribution of this thesis is the demonstration of an active sensing behavior in mouse vision. The strategy to wiggle the wheel to enhance visual detection illustrates how head-fixed mice meet the perceptual demands of the task. With access to a corresponding brain-wide map of neural data (The International Brain Laboratory, 2023), we were able to show that visual areas of the mouse brain contribute to the active sensing behavior.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | False Starts, Wrong Turns, and Dead Ends |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10203293 |
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