Search
Presentation Details
| Poster #176 Hedonic bias in perception of opposing olfactory stimuli |
| Abby B. Finkelstein1, Ariana Glick2, 1, Elizabeth Daramola3, 1, Venkatesh N. Murthy1 1Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States 2Northeastern University, Boston, MA, United States 3Boston University, Boston, MA, United States |
The world constantly presents animals with conflicting sensory information, to which they respond with approach or avoidance based on their current internal state. Our project focuses on how opposing cues are resolved to make sensory decisions. In the presented task, head-restrained mice learn to lick or avoid licking in response to binary mixtures of punished and rewarded odors in which the dominant component predicts outcome. Trained mice are presented with eight randomized binary mixtures including trials of 50/50 ratios. Mice’s likelihood of licking depends on the proportion of rewarded odor and generalizes to novel ratios, indicating that performance is based on perceived odor dominance rather than mixture recognition. Ambiguous mixtures lead to variable but positively skewed decision making. To study how such decisions can be flipped by acute states, we induced an anxiety-like state using non-invasive, naturalistic exposure to bright light prior to task initiation. The anxiety-like state shifts decision making in our task in males but not females, driving less risk-averse and faster decision making on ambiguous trials while preserving performance on easy ratios. Our task thus enables us to ask how the olfactory system quickly alters its weighing of olfactory information. The neural dynamics giving rise to opposite responses trial-to-trial and to the global shifting of responses across states are likely reflected in the olfactory tubercle (OT) of the ventral striatum. Ongoing experiments employ cellular resolution multiphoton calcium imaging of the OT throughout the task, in tandem with pupillometry and facial recordings to interrogate emotional and attentional dynamics. These experiments aim to uncover the mechanisms of cognitive bias in sensory decision making. |