INVESTIGADORES
LOCATELLI Fernando Federico
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Associative learning shapes mixture representation and improves perception of relevant odors.
Autor/es:
MARACHLIAN EMILIANO; LOCATELLI FERNANDO
Lugar:
Huerta Grande, Cordoba
Reunión:
Congreso; Congreso SAN 2013; 2013
Institución organizadora:
Sociedad Argentina de Investigaciones en Neurociencias
Resumen:
Associative learning shapes mixture representation and improves perception of
relevant odors.
Emiliano Marachlian and Fernando
Locatelli
Laboratorio de
Neurobiología de la Memoria, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales,
Universidad de Buenos Aires. IFIByNE- CONICET.
Argentina
Odors in nature are complex mixture, in which
irrelevant components may hide the presence of relevant ones. In the present
work we ask if olfactory experience increases the ability of animals to detect
the relevant odors. The olfactory system of insects provides a good model for
this study. The antennal lobe is the first processing center for olfactory
information in the insect brain. The local network conformed by excitatory and
inhibitory local neurons transforms the olfactory information before it leaves
the antennal lobe to other brain areas. We train bees to pure odors and perform
calcium imaging in projection neurons of the antennal lobes to measure neural
activity patterns elicited by pure odors and mixtures that contain these odors.
On the basis of patterns obtained for naïve animals we assayed different
algorithms that allow accurate prediction of the pattern elicited by the
mixture. The prediction algorithms were later applied to animals that have been
trained on appetitive conditioning using as conditioned stimulus one of the
components of the mixture. We found that the representation of the mixture in
trained animals deviates from the mixture predicted for naïve animals. This
deviation is in favor of the representation of the rewarded odor. In addition we found a general decrease in the
activity elicited by odors in the trained animals.