A behavioral paradigm for measuring perceptual distances in mice

Perceptual similarities, or distances between sensory stimuli provide valuable information about the structure and geometry of sensory spaces, and typically are measured in humans but rarely in other species. However, understanding the neural computations responsible for sensory representations requires the monitoring and sometime manipulating of neural activity, which is more readily achieved in non-human experimental models. Here we develop a behavioral paradigm that allows for the quantifying of perceptual similarity between sensory stimuli in mice using olfaction as a model system.