Individual Differences in Mouse Cognition

College Of The Holy Cross, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

PI: Charles Locurto Title: Individual differences in mouse cognition This work is inspired by one of the most often studied aspects of human cognition: If human subjects are given a battery of cognitive tasks, the almost universal finding is that all the tasks correlate positively. That is, subjects who do well on one task tend to do well on others. This consistency suggests that a general mechanism or small set of common mechanisms may underlie different forms of cognition. That possibility, in turn, has given rise to numerous experimental efforts to locate the fundamental process or processes that underlie these positive correlations. These experiments ask whether that same finding of positive correlations across cognitive tasks is true in nonhumans. Mice were chosen at the outset of this work because one of the long-term goals is to identify the genes that underlie any correlations that are found. They are the ideal model through which to study the genetic foundations of individual differences in cognition. The studies completed to date indicated that as the nature of the cognitive tasks and motivational systems used in this work have been made more diverse, the results have less and less resembled the common finding in humans of a general mechanism. The results at this junction appear more congenial to a modular rather than to a general-process interpretation. Instead of one robust general mechanism, the results in mice suggest that different and independent processes underlie performance on different tasks. These results have far-reaching implications. One of the central issues in the field of comparative cognition has always been the relationship between humans and other animals. What makes us unique? What do we share with other species? If a general mechanism is evident in humans but is absent in animals, this distinction may prove as important as the distinction inherent in the long-standing controversy concerning whether animals and humans differ with respect to linguistic abilities.