Exploring behavioral learning paradigms to study contextual modulation of olfaction in head-fixed mice

ANTONIA MARIN BURGIN; SEBASTIAN A. ROMANO; MACARENA AMIGO DURAN; NOEL FEDERMAN

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

Associations of sensory stimuli with positive or negative experiences are a very important adaptive response for survival. How animals integrate that information about sensory stimuli with past experience, spatial context and their internal state is not completely understood. Here we explore different behavioral paradigms to evaluate the effect of spatial context on the association of an odor with a reward. Mice were trained in a head- fixed apparatus to perform a GO/NO GO learning paradigm in which the animal learns to drink water or not depending on the context in which the odor is presented. We evaluated different learning strategies and different contextual settings and measured the performance of animals in discriminating two odors and two contexts when only one combination was associated with a water reward. The results show that when animals learn odors and contexts at the same time, the odor dominates the learning and the contexts are not learned. Learning in sequence, first context and then odors, seems to improve the performance of the task.