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

NOEL FEDERMAN; ANTONIA MARIN BURGIN; MACARENA AMIGO DURAN

Cordoba

Congreso; Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias; 2018

SAN

e 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 thatinformation about learnt sensory stimuli with spatial context and animal internal state is not completely understood. Here we explore dierent learning paradigms to evaluatethe inuence 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 GOdiscrimination task in which the animal learns to drink water or not depending on the context in which the odor is presented. We evaluated dierent contextual settings anddierent training protocols. Our results show that background illumination was not efective as stimulus to induce context-odor-reward learning. In contrast, virtualenvironments in which animals can run to arrive the dierent context induce a fast increase in performance. Furthermore, if animals learn in sequence, rst context-rewardassociation and later odor-context-reward association, they undergo rapid learning reaching to criterion within a few trials and maintaining their performance on time. Herewe show the development of a spatial context-odor task suited to probing the neural basis of spatial context modulation of an olfactory-based behavior.