Fig. 1: Schematic of the experimental timeline to capture behavioral trajectories during adolescence and adulthood in male and female mice on distinct cognitive tasks.

In humans, early adolescence is ∼10–12 years of age, mid-late adolescence ∼14–16 years of age, and early adulthood ∼20–25 years of age. Aligning this, the behavior of mice at two adolescent ages (early 4.5 W, mid 6 W) and adulthood (12 W) was measured using drug-induced locomotor hyperactivity, prepulse inhibition, and a two-object simple paired associate learning (sPAL) touchscreen task which involved pretraining to acquire operant conditioning, sPAL training, and sPAL memory retention testing following a rest period.