Touchscreen Extinction and Reversal

The touchscreen extinction and reversal task assesses the ability to suppress previously reinforced responses and flexibly update stimulus-reward associations. In the acquisition phase, subjects learn to touch one visual stimulus (S+) for food reward while withholding responses to a non-rewarded stimulus (S-). During extinction, all responses cease to produce reward, and perseverative responding indexes resistance to behavioral change. In the reversal phase, the previously non-rewarded stimulus becomes the S+ and vice versa, requiring subjects to overcome the initial association. The task engages orbitofrontal cortex, infralimbic cortex, and dorsomedial striatal circuits that mediate response inhibition and associative flexibility.

Perseverative errors during early reversal are the primary measure of cognitive inflexibility, defined as continued selection of the previously correct stimulus above chance level in the initial post-reversal block. Learning errors in later reversal blocks reflect the rate of new association formation once perseveration resolves. Extinction resistance is quantified as the number of sessions or trials to reach an extinction criterion where responding drops below a defined threshold. Response and reward collection latencies provide complementary measures of motivation and processing speed. Correct response latency typically decreases across acquisition, increases during extinction, and shows a characteristic rebound during reversal.

ConductMaze manages multi-phase touchscreen protocols by automatically transitioning between acquisition, extinction, and reversal stages based on configurable performance criteria. The system distinguishes perseverative from learning errors using block-wise analysis and tracks response probabilities to each stimulus independently. Phase transition points, error type distributions, and within-session response dynamics are exported for each subject. The platform supports pseudo-random stimulus positioning to prevent spatial biases and provides automated stability checks before phase advancement.