Towards Fully Automated Investigation of Social Learning in Mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Mice have been demonstrated to learn from each other in social interactions, the extent to which this takes place and the strategies involved, however, largely remain to be elucidated beyond spatially and temporally confined tests of social memory retention. Here, we present a method which utilizes and modifies 1) a commercially available tool for automated behavioral testing, the IntelliCage and 2) an open-source solution for 24/7 live animal tracking, the Live Mouse Tracker, to create a powerful method for the investigation of learning behavior in semi-naturalistic group settings. We see a wide range of possible applications, such as for instance the investigation of learning in social interactions, which we present here as an example. In the present study, co-learning did not facilitate place learning over individual learning. While automated annotation of behaviors was effective, markerless animal identification proved unreliable in a highly enriched environment with manifold opportunity of occlusion from video tracking. In response, we here present a rationale for identifying the reliable portion of tracking data, to which we confine the behavioral analysis. Co-learning animals engaged more often in some prosocial interactions with their teammates than with other animals, but they did overall not interact with each other more frequently than with individual learners. Correlative analysis of learning behavior and social interactions did not reveal any particular association between behavior and learning success. While the mechanisms of social learning in mice could not be conclusively elucidated within the scope of this study, we report on the development of a promising tool for presenting manifold learning tasks to mice while tracking their individual and social behaviors in a fully automated manner. Further, we discuss limitations of the current configuration and present an outlook on further improving the method.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".