Neural circuits supporting context and experience dependent representation of olfactory information

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

CABA

Simposio; Frontiers in Bioscience 3; 2018

IBioBA

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. We study if associative olfactory learning modifies odor-evoked activity in the PC, in a context- and experience-dependent manner. Mice were trained in a Go-NoGo behavioral task to associate an odor with a reward when presented in a specific spatial context. By using silicon probes to record activity of individual neurons in PC, we observed that some neurons showed odor-locked spiking activities that were modulated by context, reward and licking response. In addition, analysis of the population response of neurons using Principal Components Analysis reveals different population dynamics not only dependent on the odor, but also context and reward, suggesting that the PC encodes other attributes that are relevant to the odor experience.