Conditioning sharpens the spatial representation of rewarded stimuli in mouse primary visual cortex.

ABSTRACT: Reward is often employed as reinforcement in behavioral paradigms but it is unclear how the visuospatial aspect of a stimulus-reward association affects the cortical representation of visual space. Using a head-fixed paradigm, we conditioned mice to associate the same visual pattern in adjacent retinotopic regions with availability and absence of reward. Time-lapse intrinsic optical signal imaging under anesthesia showed that conditioning increased the spatial separation of mesoscale cortical representations of reward predicting- and non-reward predicting stimuli. Subsequent in vivo two-photon calcium imaging revealed that this improved separation correlated with enhanced population coding for retinotopic location, specifically for the trained orientation and spatially confined to the V1 r

SUBMITTER: Goltstein PM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6141231 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature