Neural circuits supporting context and experience dependent representation of olfactory information

ANTONIA MARIN BURGIN; NOEL FEDERMAN; SEBASTIAN ROMANO

buenos aires

Congreso; Frontiers in Bioscience 2018; 2018

IBioBA-MPSP | Instituto Max Planck Argentina

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 flexibleprocessing 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 fromhigher-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 otheraspects 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.