Whisker server

All training and testing was carried out in standard Bussey-Saksida mouse touchscreen chambers (Campden Instruments Ltd, Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK). These chambers have been described in detail elsewhere (Horner et al., 2013 ; Mar et al., 2013 ; Oomen et al., 2013 (link)). Briefly, the trapezoidal touchscreen-operant chamber is housed inside a sound-attenuating chamber. Responses at the touchscreen (12.1 in.; resolution 800 x 600) are made by breaking IR beams positioned close to the surface of the screen. A black perspex mask was placed in front of the touchscreen in order to protect the edges of the screen and focus responding to the appropriate spatial location. In this study, the standard ‘5-choice’ mask (Campden Instruments Ltd) was used in both the PR and the FR assessments, whilst a standard two-hole mask was used for the pairwise discrimination task (Heath et al., 2015 , 2016 ; Horner et al., 2013 ). All behavioral programs were controlled and implemented by ABET II Touch software (Campden Instruments Ltd) and Whisker Server (Cardinal & Aitken, 2010 (link)).

All mice were tested using standard Bussey-Saksida mouse touchscreen chambers (Campden Instruments Ltd., Loughborough, United Kingdom) as described in detail elsewhere (Horner et al., 2013 (link); Oomen et al., 2013 (link)). The touchscreen was covered with a black plexiglass mask with two rows of six response windows, though only the six windows in the bottom row were used. The task schedules were designed, managed, and events recorded using Whisker Server and ABETTII software (Campden Instruments). A custom analysis was created using R to analyze separation level-specific performance through training.