Cognitive flexibility, the higher-order cognition involving reversal learning, has been defined as having the ability to shift one’s previous thoughts or actions to new situations depending on situational demands. Studies of neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) showed that restricted and repetitive patterns of activities are associated with the impairments of cognitive flexibility. Some behavioral tasks including attentional set-shifting task are used to assess cognitive flexibility in mouse models for psychiatric disorders (Birrell and Brown, 2000; Colacicco et al., 2002). Here we present a two-choice digging test, which is simplified and modified from set-shifting task, for using mice to study the reversal learning (Huang et al., 2014).

Memory tests are important indexes of the brain functions for rodents behavior assay. Many memory tasks require external forces (e.g. electric shocks) or intrinsic forces (e.g. hunger and thirsty) to trigger the responses. Under those conditions, rodents are under stresses, such as pain, tired, malnutrition or dehydration, which potentially affect the natural neural responses. Novel object recognition is a non-force driving and spontaneous memory test. It is derived from curiosity but easy to be interfered with manipulation factors. In addition to stepwise procedure, the protocol described here emphasizes how to reduce the noise in the novel object recognition.