Question: where did you get the idea of teaching the mice to play computer games?

Martha Havenith answered on 22 Jun 2015:

Ha, that’s a nice story. We were already trying to teach mice to press a button when they see one thing, but not press a button when they see another thing. The learning was going really slow though, and I wasn’t happy with it. At the same time, a friend of mine was using a computer game to understand how mice use their brain to compute space. He looks at their brains through a microscope so he needed them to stay in the same place…while running through different rooms. So a computer game was really the only way he could do it. When I watched his mice, I noticed that they learned much faster. I now think that’s because finding something in space makes much more sense to a mouse than ‘this thing appears and then I press a button’ – you just use their natural abilities more that way. So I changed the game to mainly test their vision, but kept the idea of running through different spaces to search for reward.