Mouse Team | SCENE

Scientific Overview

The Mouse team investigates how rodents navigate and interact with their environment, leveraging the mouse's well-characterised neural circuits and the powerful genetic and imaging tools available for this species. Mice sense the world through whisking, olfaction, and vision, providing a unique window into how sensory and motor constraints shape neural state representations.

The team studies two broad classes of ecological tasks:

Navigation: Examining navigation-to-target in real and virtual environments, while manipulating the availability of different paths, action costs, rewards, and sensory uncertainty. These tasks are designed to engage the animal in sequential decision-making under partial observability.
Object manipulation: Presenting objects that may or may not be moved or changed by the mouse's actions, testing how the brain identifies and encodes affordances — the controllable aspects of the environment.

Over time, the team will examine interacting and hierarchical affordances, where manipulation gates navigation (e.g., moving an obstacle to open a new path) or navigation gates manipulation (e.g., reaching a location to access an object).

Key Questions

How do mice accumulate evidence and identify affordances during navigation in partially observable environments?
How do neural representations change when the availability of different paths, action costs, or rewards is manipulated?
How does the mouse brain distinguish between controllable and uncontrollable aspects of its environment?
How do sensory constraints (whisking, olfaction, vision) shape the neural state representations that guide ecological behaviour?