• Question: How do you teach the mice the difference between good stripes and bad stripes?

    Asked by Alkane to MarthaNari on 24 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      Hey Alkane,
      they have a little straw in front of their mouth, so if in the video game they run through a ‘good stripe’ wall, they immediately get a drop of soy milk. For some reason they love soy milk. Surprising but true. 🙂 When they run through a ‘bad stripe’ wall, they hear an annoying noise (like when radio signal goes bad), and then they have to run through a boring corridor for about 20 seconds to get to the next wall. So they quickly learn that when they go through the wrong wall, they can’t keep playing for a bit.
      To teach the mice at the start of the training, I make the good and the bad stripes very different (horizontal versus vertical), and I make the bad stripes less bright as well so that they’re easy to ignore. Then I slowly make them more and more similar.

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