Exploring learning paradigms to study contextual modulation of olfactory-based behavior in head-fixed mice

AMIGO DURÁN, MACARENA; ROMANO, SEBASTIÁN A.; MARIN-BURGIN, ANTONIA; FEDERMAN, NOEL

Córdoba

Congreso; XXXIII Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias; 2018

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

The ability to learn that a sensory stimulus signals a reward or punishment is one of the brain functions most critical for adaptation and survival. How animals integrate that information about learnt sensory stimuli with spatial context and animal internal state is not completely understood. Here we explore di erent learning paradigms to evaluate the in uence of spatial context on the association of an odor with a reward. Water-restricted mice were trained in a head- xed apparatus to perform a GO/NO GO discrimination task in which the animal learns to drink water or not depending on the context in which the odor is presented. We evaluated di erent contextual settings and di erent training protocols. Our results show that background illumination was not e ective as stimulus to induce context-odor-reward learning. In contrast, virtual environments in which animals can run to arrive the di erent context induce a fast increase in performance. Furthermore, if animals learn in sequence, rst context-reward association and later odor-context-reward association, they undergo rapid learning reaching to criterion within a few trials and maintaining their performance on time. Here we show the development of a spatial context-odor task suited to probing the neural basis of spatial context modulation of an olfactory-based behavior.