Animal performance progressively improved during SAT. (A) Structure of SAT. (B) Trial structure. A 0.5 sec airpuff was presented after a random delay of 0.2–0.8 sec. Water was delivered after a fixed 0.5 sec delay. Anticipatory licking frequency (Hz) before the water delivery in both stimulus and blank trials was used to calculate the animal's performance. (C) Behavioral and imaging time line. Ten-day SAT started after 6-day ACC. (D) Mean anticipatory licking frequency for stimulus trials (green) and blank trials (red), and mean number of trials per day (gray shaded area). Blue shaded area indicates the training period. (E) Performance was defined as anticipatory lick frequency in stimulus + water trials (Lwater/Lw) minus anticipatory lick frequency in blank trials (Lblank/Lb; see Materials and Methods) averaged across all mice. (F) P values of anticipatory licking frequency of the last 20% of stimulus and blank trials for each animal. Asterisks indicate the learning day (see Materials and Methods: criteria for learning).
