The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice.

Balancing experimental control with ecological validity remains a central challenge for studying brain function. Here, we developed the Tower Foraging Park (TFP), a self-paced behavioral paradigm that emulates patch foraging and in which mice collect rewards by performing directional quarter-turns around square towers (exploit) and switching between them as they become depleted (explore). Mice rapidly learned the rewarded turning direction, increased movement speed, reduced trajectory variability, and typically abandoned towers before depletion. Reversal of the rewarded direction triggered rapid adaptation, accompanied by a dissociation between movement variability and speed. Repeated reversals progressively improved flexibility. Increasing the difficulty of locating rewarding towers prolonged exploitation, revealing adaptive regulation of patch-leaving decisions. Finally, mice trained under flexible contingencies ultimately outperformed those trained under stable contingencies in a challenging context. Altogether, the TFP reveals mechanisms underlying flexible foraging and provides a versatile, ecologically grounded platform for investigating the neural bases of adaptive behavior.