A. M. Schneider, J. N. McGregor, M. Song, J. L. Amme, S. Zheng, D. Wu, J. Tu, G. Yao, E. Eslinger, J. Chitalia, J. Powers, V. Sinha, E. L. Dyer, D. Levenstein, K. B. Hengen
Ethological behavior requires the integration of perception, memory, and decision-making, yet standard laboratory tasks are often too simplified to recruit these processes jointly. Here, mice that were expert hunters in a bare arena were challenged to capture live insect prey among objects that occlude vision and afford opportunities to hide. This revealed an axis of learning absent in an empty arena: mice improved not by refining pursuit but by reorganizing how they searched for concealed prey. An agent-based model showed that short-term memory and learning of object-specific values are sufficient to account for the behavior demonstrated by mice. A compact ethogram of object-directed actions revealed that animals selectively acquired the interactions most likely to expose prey. These results show that environmental complexity recruits memory- and value-guided search strategies. Reproducible with inexpensive materials, the paradigm and its open-source analyses offer a sensitive read-out of cognitive processes largely unobservable in conventional assays.