Topic: voluntary exercise

In addition to maintaining a healthy body, physical activity benefits the brain, improving memory and cognition. While some of the physiological effects of voluntary exercise on the brain are known (e.g., increased hippocampal neurogenesis), little is known about its effects on the neural code. Using longitudinal Ca2+ imaging in freely behaving mice and tracking the same neurons over weeks, we studied how voluntary exercise affects the quality and long-term stability of hippocampal place codes. In addition to increasing neurogenesis, we found that running accelerated the emergence of spatial c

The ventral tegmental area (VTA) encompassing dopaminergic (DA) neurons, is a brain region crucial for processing information about various rewards and guiding appetitive behaviours directed towards them. Importantly, how the VTA DA neurons encode different rewards and to what extent this information overlaps within different DA cells is poorly understood.For that reason, we recorded the electrophysiological activity of VTA neurons in freely-behaving male mice using silicon probes while the animals were free to spontaneously explore different rewards. The arena contained several natural reward

Stable neural ensembles are often thought to underlie stable learned behaviors and memory. Recent longitudinal experiments, however, that tracked the activity of the same neurons over days to weeks have shown that neuronal activity patterns can change over extended timescales even if behaviors remain the same – a phenomenon termed representational drift. Here we test whether neural circuit remodeling (defined as any change in structural connectivity) contributes to representational drift. To do this, we tracked how hippocampal CA1 spatial representations of a familiar environment change with t

Adequate regulation of innate behaviours is crucial for survival. The ventral tegmental area (VTA) forms the core of the neural circuitry driving these motivated behaviours. VTA dopamine (VTA-DA) neurons encode reward and reward-predicting cues heterogeneously. Moreover, individual neurons respond to different behavioural and kinematic variables. However, it remains unclear whether individual dopamine neurons respond to competing rewards like feeding and voluntary exercise heterogeneously. Additionally, it is unknown how motivational state changes, such as hunger or enhanced exercise drive, in