Mus musculus mice self-organize existing behaviors into structured bouts as they become expert hunters.
- 1Janelia Research Campus, HHMI
Abstract
In the wild, a mouse must flexibly perform multiple computations at once, rapidly navigating, sampling its environment, forming and using memories, and balancing internal needs. Capturing the self-paced, low-repetition, complex nature of decision making in the wild while preserving the experimental control needed to interpret its process remains a challenge. Here we show that lab mice, without food restriction, learn to forage for hidden resources cued by ambiguous sounds in a dynamic environment by spatiotemporally reorganizing their existing behavioral repertoire. Using a novel closed-loop assay, we required mice to sit still to receive informative but hard-to-localize sound cues emanating from one correct location they must find, out of 157 possible locations in a large arena. With experience, mice become efficient hunters. Efficient hunting cannot be explained by an increase in a particular behavioral module, but instead, mice reorganize existing behaviors into clustered bouts of high-quality sampling and site-checking. Looking forward, this work establishes an approach for studying the neural, molecular, and evolutionary basis of naturalistic decision-making in mice.
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BibTeX
@misc{shettigar2026musculus,
title = {{Mus musculus mice self-organize existing behaviors into structured bouts as they become expert hunters.}},
author = {N. Shettigar and L.-Q. Zhang and J. Teran and L. Schuster and A. Sohn and K. Branson and E. J. Dennis},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.02.748903},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.02.748903v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Mus musculus mice self-organize existing behaviors into structured bouts as they become expert hunters.
AU - N. Shettigar
AU - L.-Q. Zhang
AU - J. Teran
AU - L. Schuster
AU - A. Sohn
AU - K. Branson
AU - E. J. Dennis
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/02
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.02.748903
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.02.748903v1
AB - In the wild, a mouse must flexibly perform multiple computations at once, rapidly navigating, sampling its environment, forming and using memories, and balancing internal needs. Capturing the self-paced, low-repetition, complex nature of decision making in the wild while preserving the experimental control needed to interpret its process remains a challenge. Here we show that lab mice, without food restriction, learn to forage for hidden resources cued by ambiguous sounds in a dynamic environment by spatiotemporally reorganizing their existing behavioral repertoire. Using a novel closed-loop assay, we required mice to sit still to receive informative but hard-to-localize sound cues emanating from one correct location they must find, out of 157 possible locations in a large arena. With experience, mice become efficient hunters. Efficient hunting cannot be explained by an increase in a particular behavioral module, but instead, mice reorganize existing behaviors into clustered bouts of high-quality sampling and site-checking. Looking forward, this work establishes an approach for studying the neural, molecular, and evolutionary basis of naturalistic decision-making in mice.
ER -