Two-choice Digging Task in Mouse for Studying the Cognitive Flexibility

Abstract

Cognitive flexibility, the higher-order cognition involving reversal learning, has been defined as having the ability to shift one’s previous thoughts or actions to new situations depending on situational demands. Studies of neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) showed that restricted and repetitive patterns of activities are associated with the impairments of cognitive flexibility. Some behavioral tasks including attentional set-shifting task are used to assess cognitive flexibility in mouse models for psychiatric disorders (Birrell and Brown, 2000; Colacicco et al., 2002). Here we present a two-choice digging test, which is simplified and modified from set-shifting task, for using mice to study the reversal learning (Huang et al., 2014).