Author: Sebastian Arturo Ceballo CharpentierPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Through our senses, the brain receives an enormous amount of information. This information needs to be filtered in order to extract the most salient features to guide our behavior. How the brain actually generates different percepts and drives behavior, remain the two major questions in modern neuroscience. To answer these questions, novel neural engineering approaches are now employed to map, model and finally generate, artificial sensory perception with its learned or innate associated behavioral outcome. In this work, using a Go/noGo discrimination task combined with optogenetics to silence auditory cortex during ongoing behavior in mice, we have established the dispensable role of auditory cortex for simple frequency discriminations, but also its necessary role to solve a more challenging task. By the combination of different mapping techniques and light-sculpted optogenetics to activate precisely defined tonotopic fields in auditory cortex, we could elucidate the strategy that mice use to solve this hard task, revealing a delayed frequency discrimination mechanism. In parallel, observations about learning speed and sound-triggered activity in auditory cortex, led us to study their interactions and causally test the role of cortical recruitment in associative learning, revealing it as a possible neurophysiological correlate of saliency.