* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    George Lopez is coming to Spokane – KXLY.com

    George Lopez is coming to Spokane – KXLY.com

    Netflix unveils Dallas immersive venue for fans of hit shows like ‘Squid Game,’ ‘Stranger Things’ – Houston Chronicle

    Step Inside Netflix’s New Dallas Immersive Experience Featuring Hits Like ‘Squid Game’ and ‘Stranger Things

    ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’: Civic Players bring ‘Young Frankenstein’ to life – Yahoo

    Civic Players Deliver a Hilarious and Unforgettable Performance of ‘Young Frankenstein

    ‘Wheel of Fortune’: Amputee Wins $60,000 After Breaking Incredible ‘Curse’ – Hastings Tribune

    Wheel of Fortune’ Amputee Breaks Incredible ‘Curse’ to Win $60,000!

    North Star Sports & Entertainment Network: Coming soon – KTTC News

    North Star Sports & Entertainment Network: Coming soon – KTTC News

    Safety concerns in Deep Ellum create apprehension as the entertainment district gains visitors – CBS News

    Safety Concerns Surge Amid Deep Ellum’s Booming Popularity and Growing Crowds

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Frontdoor Announces Tech Expert Dr. Bala Ganesh as Chief Technology Officer – Business Wire

    Frontdoor Appoints Tech Visionary Dr. Bala Ganesh as New Chief Technology Officer

    Defense technology giant Northrop Grumman to host interviews in Iuka to fill technician roles – supertalk.fm

    Defense technology giant Northrop Grumman to host interviews in Iuka to fill technician roles – supertalk.fm

    China’s Military Introduces Mosquito-Sized Drones: A Game-Changing Surveillance Technology – Indian Defence Review

    China Unveils Mosquito-Sized Drones: Revolutionizing Surveillance Technology

    Marvell Technology Stock Rallies After AI Event Sparks Investor Optimism – Yahoo Finance

    Marvell Technology Stock Rallies After AI Event Sparks Investor Optimism – Yahoo Finance

    Promising Technology Stocks To Follow Today – June 22nd – MarketBeat

    Top Technology Stocks to Watch Today – June 22nd

    Technology Convergence Report 2025 – The World Economic Forum

    Technology Convergence Report 2025 – The World Economic Forum

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    George Lopez is coming to Spokane – KXLY.com

    George Lopez is coming to Spokane – KXLY.com

    Netflix unveils Dallas immersive venue for fans of hit shows like ‘Squid Game,’ ‘Stranger Things’ – Houston Chronicle

    Step Inside Netflix’s New Dallas Immersive Experience Featuring Hits Like ‘Squid Game’ and ‘Stranger Things

    ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’: Civic Players bring ‘Young Frankenstein’ to life – Yahoo

    Civic Players Deliver a Hilarious and Unforgettable Performance of ‘Young Frankenstein

    ‘Wheel of Fortune’: Amputee Wins $60,000 After Breaking Incredible ‘Curse’ – Hastings Tribune

    Wheel of Fortune’ Amputee Breaks Incredible ‘Curse’ to Win $60,000!

    North Star Sports & Entertainment Network: Coming soon – KTTC News

    North Star Sports & Entertainment Network: Coming soon – KTTC News

    Safety concerns in Deep Ellum create apprehension as the entertainment district gains visitors – CBS News

    Safety Concerns Surge Amid Deep Ellum’s Booming Popularity and Growing Crowds

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Frontdoor Announces Tech Expert Dr. Bala Ganesh as Chief Technology Officer – Business Wire

    Frontdoor Appoints Tech Visionary Dr. Bala Ganesh as New Chief Technology Officer

    Defense technology giant Northrop Grumman to host interviews in Iuka to fill technician roles – supertalk.fm

    Defense technology giant Northrop Grumman to host interviews in Iuka to fill technician roles – supertalk.fm

    China’s Military Introduces Mosquito-Sized Drones: A Game-Changing Surveillance Technology – Indian Defence Review

    China Unveils Mosquito-Sized Drones: Revolutionizing Surveillance Technology

    Marvell Technology Stock Rallies After AI Event Sparks Investor Optimism – Yahoo Finance

    Marvell Technology Stock Rallies After AI Event Sparks Investor Optimism – Yahoo Finance

    Promising Technology Stocks To Follow Today – June 22nd – MarketBeat

    Top Technology Stocks to Watch Today – June 22nd

    Technology Convergence Report 2025 – The World Economic Forum

    Technology Convergence Report 2025 – The World Economic Forum

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home Science

Lab mice might be doing their own experiments

April 29, 2024
in Science
Lab mice might be doing their own experiments
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

It’s long been known that mice can be trained to perform simple tasks in exchange for a reward. Bribe a hungry mouse with a morsel of food or a thirsty mouse with a drop of water and you can encourage it to navigate a maze or click a particular button. But sometimes, mice don’t act as expected, failing to complete the task at hand. Often, researchers have dismissed these actions as simple mistakes, resulting from inattention or disengagement. Yet, a study published April 26 in the journal Current Biology suggests, there’s more going on: mice can understand the rules of a task and still deviate in their behaviors, potentially testing their own hypotheses and attempting to learn more about their surroundings. 

“These mice have a richer internal life than we probably give them credit for. They are not just stimulus response machines. They may have things like strategies.”

It appears that the decisions mice make during behavioral tests are more complicated than just basic reward-seeking choices. During human-imposed trials in the lab, mice may be continually exploring and re-testing the rules of their environment and performing their own small experiments.

[ Related: Mice may be able to recognize their own reflections ]

The findings expand our understanding of what’s happening inside rodent brains and indicate mice and other non-verbal animals might know more than they let on. The research could eventually help shed light on the neurological underpinnings of human behavior as well. “These mice have a richer internal life than we probably give them credit for,” says Kishore Kuchibhotla, senior study author and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. “They are not just stimulus response machines. They may have things like strategies,” he adds.

Mice at the steering wheel

The work builds on previous research that tested mice on a simple licking task and adds a level of complexity with a two-choice test to parse mouse motivations. Kuchibhotla and lead study author Ziyi Zhu, a neuroscience PhD student, trained thirsty mice, restrained in place,  to spin a wheel with their front legs in a certain direction in response to a sound. One tone corresponded with turning the wheel to the right, a second tone with spinning it to the left. If a mouse responded to either of the sounds with the correct action, it would get a tiny cup of water. If it spun the wheel the wrong way or didn’t spin it at all, nothing happened. 

Throughout thousands of trials involving 13 mice, the researchers tracked mouse choice, response speed, and accuracy, and they noticed several patterns. For one, mice seemed to get more accurate in their decisions as the trials progressed, indicating they were mastering the task at hand. Individual mice also seemed to have quirks and preferences when it came to picking a wheel direction. And even when mice reached an expert level of wheel-steering competency, they would still display short bouts of wrong responses–often spinning the wheel in the same direction repeatedly, regardless of which sound was played. 

[ Related: How video game tech, AI, and computer vision help decode animal pain and behavior ]

To better understand what was happening during these bouts, Kuchibhotla and Zhu instituted “probe” trials, where they temporarily stopped rewarding the mice for correct answers. Very quickly, mice changed course, stopped exploring, and began to respond to the right and left sound cues more accurately, in accordance with the pattern they’d been trained on–indicating the mice understood what they were supposed to do to get the cup of water, and had been purposefully forsaking reward.

“As behavioral neuroscientists who work in animal models, the onus is on us to come up with more clever and rich ways to extract meaning from nonverbal animals’ [actions],” says Dr. Brian Sweis PhD, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Mount Sinai who conducts animal behavior research but was not involved in the new study. “I think this paper did a really nice job of that… it was a beautiful deep dive into a behavioral analysis,” he adds–pointing especially to the follow-up examination of the initial trial data and the ways the researchers varied their experiments. 

“It may look like the animal is making a ton of errors, but during those errors, it’s actually getting smarter.”

Using a computational model, Zhu and Kuchibhotla assessed how each trial outcome related to the ones before and after it and what factors seemed to be influencing mouse behavior. They found that reward played a big role, but so did a bias towards rotating the wheel in a preferred direction, which differed from mouse to mouse. Yet this bias wasn’t fixed–mice would switch it up, spinning to both sides over the course of many trials and when the researchers presented mice with sound prompts for exclusively their preferred direction, the mice would exhibit more periods of rotating the wheel to their non-preferred side. Taken altogether, these observations show a dynamic choice bias that the researchers hypothesize is a learning strategy. 

Learning without language

 “Mice are surprisingly using higher-order approaches to learn even simple tasks, which may seem maladaptive. It may look like the animal is making a ton of errors, but during those errors, it’s actually getting smarter,” says Kuchibhotla. “We put these animals in these bizarre situations. They don’t know when the environment may change. They don’t know when we may change the rules on them. There’s value in having this sort of continuous exploration.”

Where humans can rely on language to understand an assignment, non-verbal animals have to find out for themselves what the rules of a particular situation are. Kuchibhotla suggests this difference could account for why mice take on this continually shifting approach to a task. “Verbal or written instructions collapse the mental space of exploration. Once you know what you’re supposed to do, there’s no need to explore. That’s one of the hypotheses we have–that in the absence of instructions humans will [also] engage in continuous exploration.” He’s currently conducting follow-up research in human behavioral trials to determine if that’s true. 

Finding lessons in mouse mistakes

Other follow-up work includes tracking the mice’s neural activity as they engage in the wheel spinning task, training and testing the mice on multiple tasks at once to see how strategies change, and running cognitively impaired mice through similar tests which could ultimately reveal underlying patterns in human neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s.

There are limitations to what this single study proves. Despite all the researchers’ carefulness, something simpler than strategizing could still be at play, offers Sweis. For instance, maybe the mice changed the direction they spun the wheel in every so often because their front legs got tired. “I don’t think that negates anything [the study authors are] showing here, but physical factors could be a driver,” says Sweis. “We have to understand the brian in the context of the whole body.”

Still though, examining the choice process, he explains, “gives us insight into the many different ways the brain can work” and can clarify what’s happening when things start to go wrong. He suggests another follow-up project could look at how aging influences the exploration process and if task flexibility shifts or declines with age. There are many possible offshoots for interesting research, and the study “serves as a rich foundation for us to understand biology a little bit more.” 

It reframes decades of rodent behavior results, where errors were dismissed as uninteresting failures. “Animals need to make mistakes to learn,” says Sweis–and there’s lots we can learn from them too.

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : Popular Science – https://www.popsci.com/science/mice-mistakes-on-purpose/

Tags: DoingExperimentsscience
Previous Post

Pound Sterling trades on a positive note around 1.2520

Next Post

Be prepared while on the road with this fast-charging jump starter & power bank, now on sale for $69.99

Frontdoor Announces Tech Expert Dr. Bala Ganesh as Chief Technology Officer – Business Wire

Frontdoor Appoints Tech Visionary Dr. Bala Ganesh as New Chief Technology Officer

June 25, 2025
City council approves Sports Illustrated Resort – WBRC 6 News

City Council Approves Exciting New Sports Illustrated Resort Project

June 25, 2025
MEPAG Search for Life – Science Analysis Group Science Community Virtual Workshops – astrobiology.com

MEPAG Search for Life – Science Analysis Group Science Community Virtual Workshops – astrobiology.com

June 25, 2025
Volusia County Marine Science Center reopens to the public – Spectrum News 13

Volusia County Marine Science Center Welcomes Visitors Once Again

June 25, 2025

Boss Lifestyle’ Ponzi Scheme Mastermind Admits Guilt in $23 Million Fraud Scandal

June 25, 2025
Exclusive | Stablecoin World Opens Up to Main Street Banks – WSJ

Exclusive | Stablecoin World Opens Up to Main Street Banks – WSJ

June 25, 2025
UK calls China a major challenge but an essential economic partner – AP News

UK Labels China a Major Challenge While Emphasizing Its Role as a Vital Economic Partner

June 25, 2025
George Lopez is coming to Spokane – KXLY.com

George Lopez is coming to Spokane – KXLY.com

June 25, 2025
Neera Tanden defends use of presidential autopen, denies covering up Biden’s health – WSYX

Neera Tanden Defends Use of Presidential Autopen, Rejects Claims of Concealing Biden’s Health Information

June 25, 2025
Blake Farenthold, 63, Congressman Who Quit in Harassment Case, Dies – The New York Times

Former Congressman Blake Farenthold, Who Resigned Amid Harassment Scandal, Dies at 63

June 25, 2025

Categories

Archives

June 2025
MTWTFSS
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30 
« May    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (698)
  • Economy (716)
  • Entertainment (21,612)
  • General (15,556)
  • Health (9,755)
  • Lifestyle (721)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (718)
  • Politics (723)
  • Science (15,934)
  • Sports (21,213)
  • Technology (15,702)
  • World (696)

Recent News

Frontdoor Announces Tech Expert Dr. Bala Ganesh as Chief Technology Officer – Business Wire

Frontdoor Appoints Tech Visionary Dr. Bala Ganesh as New Chief Technology Officer

June 25, 2025
City council approves Sports Illustrated Resort – WBRC 6 News

City Council Approves Exciting New Sports Illustrated Resort Project

June 25, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version