Internal states emerge early during learning of a perceptual decision-making task

Recent work has shown that during perceptual decision-making tasks, animals frequently alternate between different internal states or strategies. However, the question of how or when these emerge during learning remains an important open problem. Does an animal alternate between multiple strategies from the very start of training, or only after extensive exposure to a task? Here we address this question by developing a dynamic latent state model, which we applied to training data from mice learning to perform a visual decision-making task. Remarkably, we found that mice exhibited distinct "engaged" and "biased" states even during early training, with multiple states apparent from the second training session onward. Moreover, our model revealed that the gradual improvement in task performance over the course of training arose from a combination of two factors: (1) increased sensitivity to stimuli across all states; and (2) increased proportion of time spent in a higher-accuracy "engaged" state relative to biased states. These findings highlight the power of our approach for characterizing the temporal evolution of multiple strategies across learning.