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Vicarious trial and error

GL Gian Luca Lancia
ME Mattia Eluchans
MD Marco D’Alessandro
HS Hugo J. Spiers
GP Giovanni Pezzulo
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Vicarious Trial and Error (VTE) describes a stereotypical behavior that humans and rodents exhibit when uncertain at decision points (e.g., in T-mazes) and which consists in moving the head back and forth between the possible paths [39,41]. This behavior has been shown to be associated with endogenously generated hippocampal dynamics called "forward sweeps" and the sequential activation of sequences of place cells that correspond to possible future locations [89].

Here, we measure a “VTE event” by considering when the participant halts (speed under a threshold vthreshold = 1[frame−1]) and looks around (angular velocity over a threshold θ˙threshold=10[degree/frame]), and “VTE rate” is the percentage of time over the entire trial time spent doing VTE.

Copyright and License information:  ©2023 Lancia et al
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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