Measuring Behavior 2005: Zarayskaya et al.

Interaction of developing mouse pups with environmental obstacles: behavioral patterns and sensorimotor strategies

I.Yu. Zarayskaya, T.V. Mukhina and K.V. Anokhin

Anokhin Institute of Normal Physiology, Moscow, Russia

The capability to overcome obstacles in the environment to reach the goal is an adaptive feature of animal behavior that develops gradually in altricial mammals. The objective of this study was to investigate the developmental dynamics, sensorimotor strategies and patterns of interaction of neonatal mice with environmental obstacles to obtain data for biologically inspired autonomous mobile robots.

The experimental data were obtained from a behavioral study of 6- and 10-day-old C57BL/6 mouse pups. To provoke the interaction of pups with obstacles (walls and corners) we placed mice in Y-maze where a goal arm was scented with home cage odor. Behavior of mice was recorded using a custom made videotracking software. Mouse interaction with the obstacle was described in terms of their actions and of their vibrissae contacts with the wall. The combination of ‘vibrissae position before the action - action itself - vibrissae position after the action’ was categorized as a single unit of a sensorimotor program. Successions of such units were called ‘episodes of interaction of pups with wall/corner’. We analyzed the structure and length of such episodes, and their success in overcoming an obstacle.

Our results show that pups follow considerably simple rules of interaction with the wall/corner that become more ef.cient and sophisticated with the development. Our next step is construction of a quantitative probabilistic model for sensorimotor rules that formalizes empirical data obtained in the behavioral study. This model will be used to control behavior of an autonomous robotic pup that will simulate real mouse pup behavior.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.