were supposed to master is simple: Turn a wheel left or right to get a reward and then recognize when the reward direction switches. When neurotypical people play such"reversal learning" games they quickly infer the optimal approach: stick with the direction that works until it doesn't and then switch right away. Notably, people with schizophrenia struggle with the task.
, their interpretation of the underlying algorithms and mechanisms may be invalid when they do not take the animals' shifting strategies into account."The research team, which also includes co-author Murat Yildirim, a former Sur lab postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, initially expected that the mice might adopt one strategy or the other.
Before the team could use an HMM to decipher their mouse performance results, however, they had to adapt it. A typical HMM might apply to individual mouse choices, but here the team modified it to explain choice transitions over the course of whole blocks. They dubbed their modified model the blockHMM. Computational simulations of task performance using the blockHMM showed that the algorithm is able to infer the true hidden states of an artificial agent.