Extracting the Dynamics of Behavior in Decision-Making Experiments

Understanding how animals update their decision-making behavior over time is an important problem in neuroscience. Decision-making strategies evolve over the course of learning, and continue to vary even in well-trained animals. However, the standard suite of behavioral analysis tools is ill-equipped to capture the dynamics of these strategies. Here, we present a flexible method for characterizing time-varying behavior during decision-making experiments. We show that it successfully captures trial-to-trial changes in an animal’s sensitivity to not only task-relevant stimuli, but also task-irrelevant covariates such as choice, reward, and stimulus history. We use this method to derive insights from training data collected in mice, rats, and human subjects performing auditory discrimination and visual detection tasks. With this approach, we uncover the detailed evolution of an animal’s strategy during learning, including adaptation to time-varying task statistics, suppression of sub-optimal strategies, and shared behavioral dynamics between subjects within an experimental population.