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

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

Córdoba, Córdoba

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

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 different learning paradigms to evaluate the influence of spatial context on the association of an odor with a reward. Water-restricted mice were trained in a head-fixed 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 different contextual settings and different training protocols. Our results show that background illumination was not effective as stimulus to induce context-odor-reward learning. In contrast, virtual environments in which animals can run to arrive the different context induce a fast increase in performance. Furthermore, if animals learn in sequence, first 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.