Neural Circuits and Systems Neuroscience
Author: María Florencia Santos | email: santos.mflorencia@gmail.com
María Florencia Santos 1°, Camila Lidia Zold 1°
1° Grupo de Neurociencias de Sistemas, Instituto de Fisiología y Biofísica B. Houssay (IFIBIO-Houssay), UBA-CONICET
The activity of the primary visual cortex (V1) encodes basic properties of visual stimuli. Experience dependent plasticity has been observed in V1 to improve visual perception. Further studies have shown that when rodents experience an association between a visual stimulus and a contingent future reward, a proportion of V1 neurons develop reward timing activity. Thus, V1 activity is also related to the behavioral significance of the cue. Cholinergic projections from the basal forebrain (BF) have been shown to be necessary and sufficient to induce V1 reward timing activity. However, little is known about how BF and V1 reward timing activity emerge and evolve during learning. To unveil this, we implant C57BL/6 adult male mice in V1 and BF and record electrophysiological activity in head-fixed mice learning a visually cued rewarded task. So far, we have trained 9 mice to initiate a lick sequence after a visual cue presentation to obtain a water reward. Animals showed a decrease in the time initiation of the lick sequence and an increase of correct trials and reward rate. On the other hand, we identified a high percentage of V1 neurons that showed reward timing activity after training. Also, we found that BF neurons show an excitatory response to reward acquisition, an inhibitory response to reward omission, and reward timing activity after training. Overall, this suggests that reward timing activity in V1 may be induced by BF reward activity.