Question: How did you teach a mice how to do it and i would like to see a picture of that!x

Martha Havenith answered on 12 Jun 2015:

Hiya! Good question!
If you want to teach mice anything, there are two big rules. First you best build on something they already do naturally. In our case, mice are used to searching for food, so in our computer game we make them run towards targets, and we give them a bit of soy milk when they reach them (kind of like finding a piece of cheese in real life, except it’s virtual and the target looks not like cheese but like a wall with black-and-white stripes).
Second, you have to start simple. So first, we put the mice in a computer game where they just run forwards in a corridor (they like running anyway), and every time they accidentally hit a target we reward them. They figure that connection out pretty quickly, so then we start moving the targets around for the mice to follow them, and then we add ‘bad’ targets that they need to ignore. By making the bad and the good targets really similar we can then try to find out how their brain can tell the (supersmall) difference.
I’ll add a foto in a moment!
[PS – fotos added now. 🙂 ]

Edit: I just realized there is also a nice video on youtube where you can see how mice can run through a virtual environment. Here goes: