Neural Circuits and Systems Neuroscience
Author: Facundo Montiel | Email: ingfacundomontiel@gmail.com
Facundo Montiel1°, Sol Ramos1°,Noel Federman1°, Antonia Marin Burgin1°, Sebastian Romano1°
1° Biomedicine Research Institute of Buenos Aires – CONICET – Partner Institute of the Max Planck Society
Animals learn to recognize the relationships between sensory and spatial information, in order to adapt their behavior accordingly. For example, rodents learn to associate olfactory and spatial cues to successfully explore the environment. Recently, our lab has shown that when odors acquire behavioral relevance through associative learning between odorants, spatial contexts and rewards, neuronal encoding at the primary piriform olfactory cortex (PCx) of the mouse undergoes dramatic changes. Using a virtual reality setup, we trained mice to recognize specific pairings between odors and virtual environments, and recorded neuronal activity from the PCx. We found that, after successfully learning this task, PCx not only encodes olfactory information, but becomes strongly modulated by the location of the animal in the virtual environment. These results suggest an unexpected role for the PCx in spatial cognition, but the degree of precision to which the PCx can encode spatial locations is still unclear. Here, we present a research project and preliminary results to address this question. We used a diversity of machine learning decoding algorithms to quantify the precision of spatial encoding in the PCx, and compared it to the precision obtained from neuronal recordings in the hippocampus (dentate gyrus and CA3), the brain region canonically involved in spatial cognition. We discuss the obtained results, and the strengths and shortcomings of the different decoding approaches.