Collaborators: Fanny Cazettes Lab (CNRS & Aix Marseille University) and IBL Core

This project investigates how animals make decisions in uncertain environments by studying the neural mechanisms underlying flexible foraging behavior. Head-fixed mice perform a continuous virtual foraging task in which they decide when to exploit a reward source and when to move to a new one, requiring them to infer hidden changes in reward availability from past outcomes. Using Neuropixels electrophysiology, behavioral measurements, and video recordings of facial movements, the project will examine how distributed brain circuits encode decision variables and behavioral strategies. By comparing neural activity across animals and across tasks, the project aims to determine whether behavioral variability can be explained by continuous differences in underlying computational processes, rather than by discrete strategies.

The IBL Core will support the project by helping standardize and organize large-scale datasets generated during these experiments, ensuring compatibility with the International Brain Laboratory data ecosystem. This includes guidance on data formatting, quality control procedures, automated processing pipelines for electrophysiology and video data, and integration of behavioral datasets with neural recordings. The collaboration will also support data sharing and open science practices by preparing curated datasets and documentation for public release, enabling the broader neuroscience community to reuse these data and analytical tools.