Presenter(s): Jardon Weems − Biology
Faculty Mentor(s): Santiago Jaramillo
Poster 3
Research Area: Neuroscience
Funding: Peter O’Day Fellowship in Biological Sciences
The neural pathways that allow an animal to select the actions it should take in response to a sound in order to get a reward are not well understood. Recent work in our lab indicates that neurons in the region of the striatum that receive inputs from the auditory cortex fire differently in response to a sound when the sound is paired with a large reward in contrast to a small reward. These data suggest that the auditory striatum may integrate information about sound and reward size in a way that could support sound-action association learning. The primary aim of this study was to determine if reward related modulation observed in the striatal neurons is already present in the inputs arriving from the auditory cortex. To investigate whether auditory cortex integrates information about reward size during decision-making, we examined the activity of auditory cortical neurons in six male wild type C57BL/6J mice. Via chronically implanted electrodes, the mice performed an auditory reward- change task in which the same sound and same action was paired with different amounts of reward. We found that 7.5% of sound responsive auditory cortical neurons were modulated by the amount of reward during the decision-making task. In addition, we found a number of neurons in the auditory cortex that responded to movement, 21.8% of which were modulated by reward size. Our previous research found that 13.9% of sound responsive neurons in the auditory striatum and 25.7% of movement responsive neurons in the auditory striatum were modulated by reward size. Together, our results suggest that auditory cortex contributes to the integration of information about reward size and auditory stimuli during decision-making, but to a lesser extent than the auditory striatum.