Presenter: Sean Kyne – Biology
Faculty Mentor(s): Santiago Jaramillo
Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—Stimuli and Response
The auditory system has a tremendous capacity to interpret all the surrounding sounds in the environment and help make sense of the world around us. To understand how our brains interpret and process complex sounds, we need a new method for studying auditory cognition. Researchers have created head-fixed rigs where mice run on a wheel while their head remains stationary and perform auditory discrimination tasks. This setting will allow us to study how the auditory system discriminates complex sounds using electrophysiological techniques that would be more challenging to apply in a freely-moving setting. Previous work in the lab suggests that it is more challenging to train mice in a head-fixed setting than in the more well-known freely moving setting. To improve our understanding of how to train head-fixed mice, they were trained to discriminate sounds of varying complexity. In each project, a new training protocol was implemented to increase our understanding of the best methods for training mice. The training protocols had varying success in teaching the task which provided helpful insights into teaching head-fixed mice auditory discrimination tasks.
Taking what was learned will allow us to teach mice more efficiently on future tasks using more complex sounds. Studying the methodology of how to train mice will allow for future experiments to use electrophysiological techniques to increase our understanding of the neural circuits used in auditory cognition.