May 5, 2025 will go down as a historic day for the Audette Lab. Our scientific ribbon cutting took place around 11:45 am EST when undergraduate researchers Claudia and Ava clicked ‘Monitor Lever’ on a Matlab2020b custom GUI in the Bousfield Psychology Building. In this inaugural experiment, a mouse will live in a custom home cage where water is accessed by correctly pressing levers. This high-throughput behavioral paradigm uses multiple sound-generating levers to build a series of predictions linking different movements to specific sensory outcomes. Subsequent electrophysiological recordings will explore how neural signals related to sensory predictions are multiplexed in auditory cortex circuits.

Despite having no lab space, no equipment, and no animals, Claudia and Ava boldly joined the lab the week that I arrived at UConn in January. We established a goal of performing behavioral experiments by the end of the first semester, which also happens to be their final undergraduate semester. Congratulations to Claudia and Ava for hitting this ambitious deadline! Luckily, they will be continuing this exciting work over the summer.

Will the mouse learn? Will MATLAB crash when the computer restarts unexpectedly for an OS update? Will we get around to organizing all those wires? Stay tuned!