Sensorimotor neural representations in the olfactory cortex

Dussauze, Marie (February 2024) Sensorimotor neural representations in the olfactory cortex. PhD thesis, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

	PDF Dussauze_Marie_SBS_thesis_final_Feb2024.pdf Restricted to Repository staff only Download (6MB)
	PDF Dussauze_Marie_SBS_thesis_submission_form_Apr2024.pdf Restricted to Repository staff only Download (156kB)

Abstract

During behavior, sensation and action function in a closed loop. Movements shape sensory input, and sensory inputs assist motor actions. The brain may build internal models that predict the sensory consequences of upcoming actions through repeated exposure to this relationship. Perception can thus be viewed as the continuous comparison of expected (sensorimotor predictions) and actual sensory inputs. Olfaction is an interesting model to study sensorimotor processing. Indeed, in vertebrates, olfaction is naturally linked to motor action through sniffing and, as in other sensory modalities, through body movements. However, most studies have probed olfactory processing during passive odor sampling. It remains to be investigated whether and how motor signals modulate olfactory representations and whether such modulation is implicated in sensorimotor predictions. To investigate active sensory processing at the behavioral and circuit- levels, I used a novel closed-loop olfactory task developed in the Albeanu lab where head-fixed mice are trained to control a lever to steer the left-right location of an odor source. In this thesis, I describe how mice learn to link motor actions to well-defined sensory expectations (odor locations) in this task. Indeed, mice counter brief sensorimotor perturbations by making corrective movements that provide us with a read-out of their individually learned sensorimotor predictions. I capitalized on this behavior to investigate the effect of motor actions on the activity of the olfactory cortex during behavior using chronically implanted tetrode drives in the anterior olfactory nucleus. I report that olfactory motor expectations reshape odor-driven responses in cortical neurons. I observed that transient perturbations often trigger stronger responses than those evoked by any other task variable. These results suggest that the olfactory cortex computes sensorimotor prediction errors by integrating sensory information with movement related predictions, presumably relayed via top-down feedback to the olfactory cortex.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	organism description > animal behavior organism description > animal behavior > olfactory
CSHL Authors:	Dussauze, Marie
Communities:	CSHL labs > Albeanu lab School of Biological Sciences > Theses
Depositing User:	Kathleen McGuire
Date:	February 2024
Date Deposited:	29 Aug 2024 18:12
Last Modified:	29 Aug 2024 19:09
URI:	https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/41641

Actions (login required)

Administrator's edit/view item