A behavioral paradigm for measuring perceptual distances in mice

Abstract

Perceptual similarities between a specific stimulus and other stimuli of the same modality provide valuable information about the structure and geometry of sensory spaces. While typically a subject of behavioral experiments in humans, perceptual similarities, or distances, are rarely measured in other species. However, understanding the neural computations responsible for sensory representations requires the monitoring and sometime manipulating of neural activity, which is more readily achieved in other experimental models. Here we develop a behavioral paradigm that allows for the quantifying of perceptual similarity between sensory stimuli using mouse olfaction as a model system.