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The area under the receiver‐operating characteristic curve (AUC) has become a popular index not only for measuring the overall prediction capacity of a marker but also the strength of the association between continuous and binary variables. In the current considered study, the AUC was used for comparing the association size of four different interventions involving impulsive decision making, studied through an animal model, in which each animal provides several negative (pretreatment) and positive (posttreatment) measures. The problem of the full comparison of the average AUCs arises therefore in a natural way. We construct an analysis of variance (ANOVA) type test for testing the equality of the impact of these treatments measured through the respective AUCs and considering the random‐effect represented by the animal. The use (and development) of a post hoc Tukey's HSD‐type test is also considered. We explore the finite‐sample behaviour of our proposal via Monte Carlo simulations, and analyse the data generated from the original problem. An R package implementing the procedures is provided in the supporting information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The firing rate of the mitral/tufted cells in the olfactory bulb is known to undergo significant trial-to-trial variability and is affected by anesthesia. Here we ask whether odorant-elicited changes in firing rate depend on the rate before application of the stimulus in the awake and anesthetized mouse. We find that prestimulus firing rate varies widely on a trial-to-trial basis and that the stimulus-induced change in firing rate decreases with increasing prestimulus firing rate. Interestingly, this prestimulus firing rate dependence was different when the behavioral task did not involve detecting the valence of the stimulus. Finally, when the animal was learning to associate the odor with reward, the prestimulus firing rate was smaller for false alarms compared with correct rejections, suggesting that intrinsic activity reflects the anticipatory status of the animal. Thus, in this sensory modality, changes in behavioral status alter the intrinsic prestimulus activity, leading to a change in the responsiveness of the second-order neurons. We speculate that this trial-to-trial variability in odorant responses reflects sampling of the massive parallel input by subsets of mitral cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]