Role of the Ventral CA1 to Primary Auditory Cortex Projection in Associative Learning

Author: Zhang, Hanwen

Year: 2020

Degree: Senior thesis (Major)

Advisors: Siapas, Athanassios G.; Cassenaer, Stijn

Committee Member: None, None

Option: Computation and Neural Systems

Abstract

As we understand more about individual brain regions, more studies begin to focus on how different regions communicate with each other. Having long been established as the center for learning and memory, the hippocampus has connections to most of neocortex as well as many subcortical regions. Some recent findings revealed that the hippocampus not only receive input from primary sensory cortices but also provide feedback projections to these areas. Do these projections play a role in sensory associative learning? Our project focused on the role of hippocampus to primary auditory cortex (A1) projections in auditory associative learning. Optogenetics was used to study the function of a direct projection from the ventral CA1 region of the hippocampus to primary auditory cortex (A1) in an auditory go/no-go task using head-fixed mice. Preliminary results show that activation of this projection does not affect task acquisition or generalization. Our next step is to investigate the effect of inhibiting the CA1 to A1 projections on auditory associative learning.

Files