Neural circuits supporting context and experience dependent representation of olfactory information

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

Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires

Congreso; Congreso Fronteras en Biociencia 3; 2018

nstituto de Investigación de Biomedicina de Buenos Aires ? CONICET ? Instituto Partner de la Sociedad Max

Olfaction is highly dependent on past experience, present context and the animal?s internal state, therefore the olfactory system constitutes an interesting model to study flexible processing of sensory stimuli. The piriform cortex (PC), the largest subregion of the olfactory cortex, receives afferent sensory inputs from the olfactory bulb and top-down inputs from higher-order association areas, such as the amygdala and entorhinal cortex. The nature of these inputs to the PC suggests that its olfactory representations may be modulated by other aspects of sensory experience, like spatial context, hedonic valence and expectation. In this work we investigate if associative olfactory learning modifies odor-evoked activity in the PC, in a context- and experience-dependent manner.