In social - science class that day, however, they were
learning complex material and behaving perfectly well — and not because they were incentivized with
rewards or threatened with punishments, but because school was, for that
period at least, actually kind of interesting.
With Simon Chen, another UC San Diego neurobiologist, the researchers monitored the activity of neurons in the motor cortex over a
period of two weeks while mice
learned to press a lever in a specific way with their front limbs to receive a
reward.