Structured experience shapes strategy learning and neural dynamics in the medial entorhinal cortex.

Structured early experience promotes flexible, generalizable strategies and neural activity reflecting task temporal structure in mice and RNNs.

• Why it matters: Understanding how prior experience influences future learning is crucial for elucidating neural mechanisms of adaptation and generalization, especially in complex tasks.
• What they did: Researchers trained recurrent neural networks on an odor timing task and tested predictions with mouse behavior and medial entorhinal cortex recordings, focusing on the impact of training curricula.
• The result: Structured training fostered neural dynamics supporting abstraction and generalization, while poorly structured experience led to rigid, error-prone strategies in both models and mice.