During perceptual decision-making, the brain encodes the upcoming decision and the stimulus information in a mixed representation. Paradigms suitable for studying decision computations in isolation rely on stimulus comparisons, with choices depending on relative rather than absolute properties of the stimuli. The adoption of tasks requiring relative perceptual judgments in mice would be advantageous in view of the powerful tools available for the dissection of brain circuits. However, whether and how mice can perform a relative visual discrimination task has not yet been fully established. Here, we show that mice can solve a complex orientation discrimination task in which the choices are decoupled from the orientation of individual stimuli. Moreover, we demonstrate a typical discrimination acuity of 9°, challenging the common belief that mice are poor visual discriminators. We reached these conclusions by introducing a probabilistic choice model that explained behavioral strategies in 40 mice and demonstrated that the circularity of the stimulus space is an additional source of choice variability for trials with fixed difficulty. Furthermore, history biases in the model changed with task engagement, demonstrating behavioral sensitivity to the availability of cognitive resources. In conclusion, our results reveal that mice adopt a diverse set of strategies in a task that decouples decision-relevant information from stimulus-specific information, thus demonstrating their usefulness as an animal model for studying neural representations of relative categories in perceptual decision-making research.

在知觉决策过程中，大脑以混合表示方式对即将到来的决策和刺激信息进行编码。适合单独研究决策计算的范式依赖于刺激比较，选择取决于刺激的相对而不是绝对属性。鉴于可用于解剖大脑回路的强大工具，在小鼠中采用需要相对感知判断的任务将是有利的。然而，小鼠是否以及如何执行相对视觉辨别任务尚未完全确定。在这里，我们展示了小鼠可以解决复杂的方向辨别任务，其中选择与个体刺激的方向分离。此外，我们展示了 9° 的典型辨别敏锐度，挑战老鼠是不良视觉鉴别器的普遍看法。我们通过引入一个概率选择模型得出了这些结论，该模型解释了 40 只小鼠的行为策略，并证明了刺激空间的圆形是固定难度试验的选择变异性的另一个来源。此外，模型中的历史偏差随着任务的参与而改变，表明对认知资源可用性的行为敏感性。总之，我们的结果表明，小鼠在一项将决策相关信息与刺激特定信息分离的任务中采用了多种策略，从而证明了它们作为研究感知决策研究中相关类别的神经表征的动物模型的有用性. 我们通过引入一个概率选择模型得出了这些结论，该模型解释了 40 只小鼠的行为策略，并证明了刺激空间的圆形是固定难度试验的选择变异性的另一个来源。此外，模型中的历史偏差随着任务的参与而改变，表明对认知资源可用性的行为敏感性。总之，我们的结果表明，小鼠在一项将决策相关信息与刺激特定信息分离的任务中采用了多种策略，从而证明了它们作为研究感知决策研究中相关类别的神经表征的动物模型的有用性. 我们通过引入一个概率选择模型得出了这些结论，该模型解释了 40 只小鼠的行为策略，并证明了刺激空间的圆形是固定难度试验的选择变异性的另一个来源。此外，模型中的历史偏差随着任务的参与而改变，表明对认知资源可用性的行为敏感性。总之，我们的结果表明，小鼠在一项将决策相关信息与刺激特定信息分离的任务中采用了多种策略，从而证明了它们作为研究感知决策研究中相关类别的神经表征的动物模型的有用性.