UC Riverside

Everyday we are presented with choices that require us to make decisions. How we understand these choices and the processes that guide us in making decisions are important aspects of cognition. Cognition with respect to decision making has been previously studied using goal-directed behavioral tasks such as Go/No-Go tasks. In Go/No-Go tasks, participants are required to make decisions in providing responses to presented stimuli, where one stimuli is a ‘go’ signal and one stimuli is a ‘no-go’ signal. Previous research has looked into the performances of participants completing Go/No-Go tasks (e.g. do participants respond highly to ‘go’ stimuli or ‘no-go’ stimuli). Such observations of behavior are at the core of response selection and response inhibition. Response selection and response inhibition are cognitive strategies utilized by individuals to complete stimulus-based tasks. Response selection is present when a subject's behavior is determined by the subject’s ability to select and execute appropriate behavioral responses. Response inhibition is present when a subject's behavior is determined by the subject’s ability to withhold the execution of inappropriate behavioral responses. The learning of either cognitive strategy and the behavioral mechanisms that drive such learning is not yet fully understood. To identify and characterize the cognitive strategy being learned by our mice, we analyzed behavioral variables (hit rate, false alarm rate, discrimination, target detection, distractor detection, pretrial spontaneous rate, and target reaction time) that were recorded when mice trained to master our Go/No-Go whisker detection task. Our task is a goal-directed behavioral task that requires mice to learn to respond to whisker deflection stimuli and distinguish target detection from distractor detection. We found that mice learned and exhibited response selection across learning and mastery of the task. During mastery of the task, target detection drives increases in Hit Rate, and Pretrial Spontaneous Rate drives increases in False Alarm Rate. Lastly, reduction in target reaction times confirmed that mice were exhibiting response selection. The approaches used in this study to characterize response selection can serve as a model for explaining behavioral trends exhibited by individuals with behavioral deficits, such as ADHD.