Psychophysical measurement of contrast sensitivity in the behaving mouse.

ABSTRACT: To understand how activity in mammalian neural circuits controls behavior, the mouse is a promising model system due to the convergence of genetic, optical, and physiological methods. The ability to control and quantify behavior precisely is also essential for these studies. We developed an operant visual detection paradigm to make visual psychophysical measurements: head-fixed mice make responses by pressing a lever. We designed this task to permit neurophysiological studies of behavior in cerebral cortex, where activity is variable from trial to trial and neurons encode many types of information simultaneously. To study neural responses in the face of this complexity, we trained mice to do a task where they perform hundreds of trials daily and perceptual thresholds can be measured. We us

SUBMITTER: Histed MH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3289478 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature