Fig. 2: Mice learn to discriminate apertures with their whiskers and learn different task rules.

a Mean lick rates and standard deviation (bands) from n = 12 mice across three different rule stages. Horizontal dashed lines indicate significant differences. b Mean success rates and standard deviation (bands) over stage progression for Go- (Hit/(Hit+Miss)), No-go (CR/(CR + FA)) and all trials ((Hit+CR)/(Hit+Miss+CR + FA)) (n = 12 mice). Dashed line indicates “moment of insight”, defined by a jump in success rate in no-go trials by a factor of five from one session to the next (n = 5 mice). c Mean performance and standard deviation over trials for 20 mm contrast. Solid lines show mean d’, calculated with a running window of the preceding 200 trials; shaded areas show standard deviation, horizontal dashed line indicates expert-level performance threshold (d’ = 1.65); n = 12 mice). Animals reached expert-level performance after 471 trials in the initial rule stage and after 1103 trials in the reversed rule stage (dotted vertical lines). d Learning times for initial-, 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd- rule reversal (dotted lines: individual animals; solid lines: means and standard deviation; n = 12 mice). e Performance for initial rule, reversed rule and extinction. Horizontal dashed line indicates expert-level performance threshold (d’ = 1.65). Performance was calculated from the last four sessions in the initial rule and reversed rule stage and the first four sessions in the extinction stage, each dot represents one session, n = 5 mice. f Population performance for mice trained on a gradually decreasing contrast. Horizontal dashed lines indicate chance-level and expert-level performance thresholds (d’ = 0 vs 1.65, respectively). Performance was calculated from the last four sessions in each contrast condition, each dot represents one session, n = 8 mice. g Number of trials required to reach expert-levels for animals trained on different contrasts in the initial and reversed rule. ns: p > 0.05, *p ≤ 0.05, **p ≤ 0.01 and ***p ≤ 0.001; a Welch’s t-test, d, g paired t-test, e repeated measures anova, f one-sample t-test. For exact statistics and box plot definitions see Supplementary Table 1.