About his PhD Project

Animals are constantly facing situations where they have to make decisions in order to achieve a goal. Foraging is a particular case where the goal is to find and consume a resource, and can involve a wide range of decision parameters. Our team developed a new experimental task allowing to study the behavior of mice in a context of foraging for water (https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.09.675194 ). In this task, mice move freely in an arena with towers that can dispense water if they perform a specific action (e.g turning around a tower in clockwise direction). Mice thus have to both learn the rules leading them to get water, make decisions accordingly and adapt their motor control to optimize their actions. In my PhD, I aim to model and link those three processes using model classes such as evidence accumulation, reinforcement learning etc.