Striatal role in the exploration/explotation balance

PROST A; MURER MG; ZOLD CL

buenos aires

Congreso; XXXII Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias; 2017

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

Little is known about the subjacent mechanisms regulating the balance between exploitationand exploration. It is presumed that the striatum is implicated in the action selection processby integrating information coming from different cortices like prefrontal, orbitofrontal andanterior cingulated cortex. Our aim is to analyze striatal neural activity during a virtualforaging task where animals must decide between exploiting a depleting water patch andsearch for another, richer one. The task consists of a virtual linear track with short rewardedareas followed by longer unrewarded corridors. Two visually distinct rewarded areas areassociated with different reward probabilities. Mice are implanted with tetrodes in the dorsalstriatum and a metal plaque used to restrain the animal´s head. Mice run on a cylinder andtheir movement is detected and translated into its position in the virtual corridor. Waterdeprived mice virtually navigate the track until the rewarded zone is reached, where theanimal needs to lick a port a certain number of times to obtain a drop of water. Currently, wetrained 7 mice to run on a virtual corridor and to stop in the rewarded areas and lick for adrop of water. We recorded striatal single units and local field potential as well as the positionof the mice and relevant events during the task. Our results also reveal that mice are able tolearn the task in hand by running towards the rewarded area and licking the port to obtainthe reward