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Poster B41 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Mice in the Manhattan Maze: Rapid Learning, Flexible Routing and Generalization, With and Without Cortex
Jieyu Zheng1 (), Rogério Guimarães1, Jennifer Hu1, Pietro Perona1, Markus Meister1; 1California Institute of Technology
Mice are flexible foragers in the wild and quickly adapt to environmental changes. Here we designed a novel navigation task, the “Manhattan Maze,” to study cognitive flexibility in mice. The Manhattan Maze is easily reconfigurable and allows systematic task designs through search algorithms in a vast space of 2^{121} possible maps. Within two days, completely naïve wildtype mice learned three complex maps, each taking a sequence of nine turn decisions to solve. On Day 1, they rapidly learned the first map after ~10 round trips. On Day 2, they retained the ability to solve the map that was repeated. Further, they accelerated at learning new maps. We then tested the maze on acortical mice, a structural mutant born without the hippocampus and most of the neocortex. Although their initial solution took ~3x longer than wildtype, acortical mice successfully learned multiple maps and approached optimal performance. Surprisingly, they also learned new maps faster and were able to solve the same maze configuration when repeated after two months. Our results suggest that the mice can rapidly learn and that the cortex is not strictly required for navigating the Manhattan Maze.
Keywords: navigation rapid learning cognitive flexibility generalization