Topic: Optogenetic suppression

Animals flexibly adjust their behavior to adapt to environmental changes. Mice excel at recognizing odorants in complex sensory conditions; however, little we know about: (1)how sudden changes in stimulus contingency modify odorant representations and (2)how changes in odorant representations causally relate to behavioral adjustments. The olfactory bulb(OB) relays odor-triggered information to higher olfactory areas, including the piriform cortex(PCx). The PCx receives input from association areas(e.g., orbitofrontal cortex) and sends dense feedback that selectively modulates one of the OB out

Visual attention enhances the neural representation of salient stimuli within the visual cortex. Although it is generally thought that this enhancement is driven by glutamatergic feedback from frontal cortical areas, cortically released neuromodulators are also believed to play a major uncharacterized role. Here we report the unexpected observation that dorsal raphe (DR) derived serotonin (5HT) controls visual attention. We adopted a behavioral model that captured how mice allocated attention to cued and uncued visual features. Simultaneous photometry recordings showed that DR activity decreas

Rodents rely heavily on somatosensation to explore their environment. The primary somatosensory cortex (S1) contributes to the encoding and perception of tactile stimuli. Although S1 neurons also receive non-tactile inputs, it is unclear whether S1 similarly encodes non-tactile sensory-based behaviour. Whole-cell patch clamp recordings were used to investigate the voltage response of layer 2/3 (L2/3) pyramidal neurons in S1 during performance in either a tactile-based or auditory-based association task in mice. A robust and sustained voltage response was evoked in L2/3 pyramidal neurons during

Lateralization of motor skills such as hand preference is a common trait across various species, including humans and rodents. It's well known that humans can alter their dominant hand through training, a process often associated with psychological stress and the potential for developmental issues, including language impairments. Yet, the neural mechanisms underlying the hand switching remain largely obscure. Our research delves into this phenomenon in mice, revealing that they can also alter their hand preference via corrective training. We focused on the basal forebrain's cholinergic system,

Our brains integrate sensory information with prior-knowledge to guide decisions. However, through which neural pathways experience can adapt behavioural responses is unclear. Predator-avoidance behaviors, particularly escape from visual-threats, represent behavioral manifestations of a decision-making process essential for survival, with the threat-value undergoing constant revision. Learning if a potentially threatening stimulus is dangerous, necessitates the integration of sensory evidence, experience and context. We speculated that visual cortex, in particular higher visual areas (HVAs), w