AN AUTOMATED PLATFORM FOR MICE BEHAVIOR, WITH VOLUNTARY HEAD FIXATION AND COLLECTIVE STABLING

The advancement of 2P calcium imaging has enabled recording the activity of thousands of neurons in parallel in behaving animals, and is frequently employed to monitor behavioral activity in head-fixed animals. Unfortunately, animal – experimenter interactions reduce results reproducibility, and human supervision time consumption is detrimental to experimental productivity.
We developed a voluntary head-fixation system, integrated in an automatic home-cage system, that allows the learning of a sound discrimination task without human supervision, and should enable automatic 2P imaging recordings. We investigated whether social interactions within the system could influence motivation and task learning rate: our preliminary data suggests a group effect on activity level, possibly mediated in part by social vocalizations emitted in the cage.
This setup is designed to build upon our previous findings on primary auditory cortex (A1), and its modulation by non-auditory information, such as movement or attentional state. Indeed, we previously showed that some A1 neurons modulate their responses to auditory stimuli depending on the meaning of sounds within a behavioral context, and identified a subpopulation of cells that seems to be responsive to a motor decision linked to the sound discrimination task. Optogenetic tools are then implemented in the system to explore the hypothesized link between these A1 neurons subpopulation and the motor execution of animal’s choice, and the role of this subpopulation in task learning.