Mus musculus mice self-organize existing behaviors into structured bouts as they become expert hunters

In the wild, a mouse must flexibly perform multiple computations at once, rapidly navigating, sampling its environment, forming and using memories, and balancing internal needs. Capturing the self-paced, low-repetition, complex nature of decision making in the wild while preserving the experimental control needed to interpret its process remains a challenge. Here we show that lab mice, without food restriction, learn to forage for hidden resources cued by ambiguous sounds in a dynamic environment by spatiotemporally reorganizing their existing behavioral repertoire. Using a novel closed-loop assay, we required mice to sit still to receive informative but hard-to-localize sound cues emanating from one correct location they must find, out of 157 possible locations in a large arena. With experience, mice become efficient hunters. Efficient hunting cannot be explained by an increase in a particular behavioral module, but instead, mice reorganize existing behaviors into clustered bouts of high-quality sampling and site-checking. Looking forward, this work establishes an approach for studying the neural, molecular, and evolutionary basis of naturalistic decision-making in mice.