Extended Data Fig. 1: Lone condition.

(a) (Left) Number of lever-presses (#LP) across days in the lone condition for each animal. (Middle) Time course of the number of beam breaks (BB) for each animal. (Right) Time course of the percentage of complete sequences (%CS) for each animal. (b) Mean Z-score (mean ± s.e.m) VTA DA activity aligned to LP for incomplete sequences when the animal is moving after the LP (Top) or staying immobile (Bottom) (Wilcoxon tests). (c) (Top) Mean Z-score VTA DA activity at LP between complete sequences and moving incomplete sequences (Mann–Whitney/Wilcoxon rank-sum test). (Bottom) Correlation between the mean Z-score VTA DA activity at LP and the time to go to the food magazine for each animal (Pearson correlation). (d) Archetypal analysis of mouse behavior in the lone condition (n = 62 mice) based on an 8-dimensional feature space: number of lever presses (#LP) and percentage of complete sequences (%CS) from day 1 to day 4 of the microsociety experiment. Residual sum of squares is shown for a number of archetypes (N_a) ranging from 1 to 6. (e) Archetype solutions for N_a = 2, 3 and 4; the color code indicates Storer, Achiever and undefined profiles. Solutions with N_a > 2 do not reveal clearly distinct new profiles. (f) Cumulative distribution of the number of LPs (#LP, Left) and of the percentage of complete sequences (%CS, Right) during the last two days of the experiment, comparing Achievers and Storers (two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests). (g) In vivo electrophysiology in anesthetized mice. (Left) Spontaneous firing rate in hertz (Hz) as a function of the percentage of spikes within burst (%SWB) for each recorded neuron, grouped by behavioral profile. (Right) Mean %SWB comparing Achiever and Storer male mice (Wilcoxon rank-sum test). Data are presented as mean ± s.e.m. Details (test statistics, df, exact p values) are reported in Supplementary Table 1. All tests were two-sided. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001, ****P < 0.0001.