Paper of the month

Paper of the month – February 2023 (Mizrahi’s lab)

Mizrahi's Lab: Learning-Induced Odor Modulation of Neuronal Activity in Auditory Cortex

Omri David Gilday and Adi Mizrahi

Journal of Neuroscience 22 February 2023, 43 (8) 1375-1386 (2022)

Lay summary:

The publication by Gilady and Mizrahi examines multi-sensory representation, asking how the brain represents newly learned, multisensory interactions.  Specifically, the researchers asked if a response of an auditory cortex neuron could be modulated by learning that the auditory stimulus was predicted by an odor stimulus.

The researchers developed a novel auditory discrimination task.  In the task, mice learned that one odor predicts an upcoming sound with low probability, and another odor predicts the nature of an upcoming sound with high probability. Figure 2 shows that the learned odors cause a modulation of neuronal activity in auditory cortex, which is correlated with the behavior of the animal. This result suggests that learning prompts novel multisensory interactions as early as the primary sensory cortex.

Figure 1:

Figure 1 shows a photograph of neurons in the mouse auditory cortex. Green depicts the molecules used to measure the neurons’ physiological signal, and red marks the neurons’ nuclei. When sounds are played, the green brightness changes, and this is an indirect measure of the neurons’ electrical activity.

 

Figure 2:

Figure 2 shows a response of one neuron in the auditory cortex in two conditions. The blue trace shows the response to a sound that follows a “predictive odor” (i.e., an odor that informs about the upcoming auditory stimulus). The red trace shows the response to the same sound following a “non-predictive” odor (i.e., an odor that informs that a different auditory stimulus will follow). In this case, the response of the neuron is higher.

“Working memory”