developed a standardized approach for investigating decision making in mice that incorporates every step of the process from the training protocol to the software used to analyze the data. To help make these studies more reproducible, the International Brain Laboratory (a collaborative research group) et al. This makes it challenging to carry out large-scale collaborations which have led to massive breakthroughs in other fields such as physics and genetics. Yet, the lack of standardized behavioral assays is leading to inconsistent results between laboratories. Mice are increasingly being used to study the neural mechanisms of decision making, taking advantage of the genetic, imaging and physiological tools that are available for mouse brains. However, this is becoming a major problem in neuroscience, as animal studies of behavior have proven to be hard to reproduce, and most experiments are never replicated by other laboratories. Researchers therefore need to know all the details of previous experiments in order to implement the procedures as exactly as possible. In science, it is of vital importance that multiple studies corroborate the same result. More generally, they indicate a path toward achieving reproducibility in neuroscience through collaborative open-science approaches. They establish a standard for reproducible rodent behavior, and provide an unprecedented dataset and open-access tools to study decision-making in mice. These results reveal that a complex mouse behavior can be reproduced across multiple laboratories. Mice in different laboratories adopted similar reliance on visual stimuli, on past successes and failures, and on estimates of stimulus prior probability to guide their choices. Learning speed was variable across mice and laboratories, but once training was complete there were no significant differences in behavior across laboratories. We trained 140 mice across seven laboratories in three countries, and we collected 5 million mouse choices into a publicly available database. We adopted a task for head-fixed mice that assays perceptual and value-based decision making, and we standardized training protocol and experimental hardware, software, and procedures. Here, we show that a standardized task to probe decision-making in mice produces reproducible results across multiple laboratories. Reproducibility, however, has been a concern in neuroscience, particularly for measurements of mouse behavior. Progress in science requires standardized assays whose results can be readily shared, compared, and reproduced across laboratories.
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