RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Touchscreen Response Precision Is Sensitive to the Explore/Exploit Trade-off
JF eneuro
JO eNeuro
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP ENEURO.0538-24.2025
DO 10.1523/ENEURO.0538-24.2025
VO 12
IS 5
A1 Mueller, Dana
A1 Giglio, Erin
A1 Chen, Cathy S.
A1 Holm, Aspen
A1 Ebitz, R. Becket
A1 Grissom, Nicola M.
YR 2025
UL http://www.eneuro.org/content/12/5/ENEURO.0538-24.2025.abstract
AB The explore/exploit trade-off is a fundamental property of choice selection during reward-guided decision making, where the “same” choice can reflect either of these internal cognitive states. An unanswered question is whether the execution of a decision provides an underexplored measure of internal cognitive states. Touchscreens are increasingly used across species for cognitive testing and afford the ability to measure the precise location of choice touch responses. We examined how male and female mice in a restless bandit decision making task interacted with a touchscreen to determine if the explore/exploit trade-off, prior reward, and/or sex differences change the variability in the kinetics of touchscreen choices. During exploit states, successive touch responses are closer together than those made in an explore state, suggesting exploit states reflect periods of increased motor stereotypy. Although exploit decisions might be expected to be rewarded more frequently than explore decisions, we find that immediate past reward reduces choice variability independently of explore/exploit state. Male mice are more variable in their interactions with the touchscreen than females, even in low-variability trials such as exploit or following reward. These results suggest that as exploit behavior emerges in reward-guided decision making, all mice become less variable and more automated in both their choice and the actions taken to make that choice, but this occurs on a background of increased male variability. These data uncover the hidden potential for touchscreen decision making tasks to uncover the latent neural states that unite cognition and movement.