Effect of Reward Size on the Activity of Auditory Cortical Neurons
| dc.contributor.author | Weems, Jardon Thomas | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2018-12-15T17:22:27Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2018-12-15T17:22:27Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2018-03 | |
| dc.description | 49 pages. Presented to the Department of Biology and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science March 2018 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The neural pathways that allow the brain to select the actions an animal should take in response to a sound in order to get a reward are not well understood. Previous studies have demonstrated that a region of the brain called the auditory striatum (AStr) receives information about sounds from the auditory cortex (AC) and uses this information to help drive actions. Additionally, the striatum may incorporate information about reward into decision-making. Recent work in our lab indicates that neurons in the AStr fire differently in response to a sound when the sound is paired with a large reward versus a small reward. These data suggest that the striatum may be integrating 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 neurons in the AC fire differently in response to a sound when the sound is paired with a large reward versus a small reward. These data will ultimately be used to discern whether modulation of sound responses by amount of reward arises in the striatum, or if it is already present in the inputs to this region arriving from the AC. To investigate the role of the AC in incorporating information about reward size during decision-making, we examined the activity of AC neurons in male C57BL/6J mice, via chronically implanted electrodes, while the mice performed an auditory reward-change task in which the same sound and same action was paired with different amounts of reward. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24135 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US | |
| dc.subject | Neuroscience | en_US |
| dc.subject | Neuroscience | en_US |
| dc.subject | Neuron | en_US |
| dc.subject | Brain | en_US |
| dc.subject | Auditory cortex | en_US |
| dc.subject | Electrophysiology | en_US |
| dc.subject | Mouse | en_US |
| dc.title | Effect of Reward Size on the Activity of Auditory Cortical Neurons | |
| dc.type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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