Event-related functional MRI of awake behaving pigeons at 7T.

ABSTRACT: Animal-fMRI is a powerful method to understand neural mechanisms of cognition, but it remains a major challenge to scan actively participating small animals under low-stress conditions. Here, we present an event-related functional MRI platform in awake pigeons using single-shot RARE fMRI to investigate the neural fundaments for visually-guided decision making. We established a head-fixated Go/NoGo paradigm, which the animals quickly learned under low-stress conditions. The animals were motivated by water reward and behavior was assessed by logging mandibulations during the fMRI experiment with close to zero motion artifacts over hundreds of repeats. To achieve optimal results, we characterized the species-specific hemodynamic response function. As a proof-of-principle, we run a color discr

SUBMITTER: Behroozi M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7501281 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature