Neural Circuitry underpinning Learning in the Olfactory System

Learning is a fundamental feature of brains; they rewire their circuitry to store new information, such as an association between a stimulus and its positive or negative outcome.

The olfactory system is an attractive location to study learning with it being easily accessible for in vivo imaging in the mouse.

Olfactory learning plays important roles throughout life including neonatal/maternal attachment, social interaction, food choice and identifying danger.

The olfactory system contains numerous factors that are thought to participate in learning including: synaptic plasticity, adult neurogenesis, and extensive inputs from other neuromodulatory brain regions. This project will ask the question: does it matter how an association is learnt?

There are multiple ways to learn a food odour, including by social transmission, operant conditioning and passive association and it appears that different neural mechanisms are employed for each of these learning paradigms. Do the different methods of learning result in different neural correlates to represent the association?

Although learning is fundamental to what brains do, little is understood about whether different learning strategies result in the same neural outcome and whether some of these are more robust to degradation. This project will begin to address this important question.

A range of cutting-edge techniques will be utilised to analyse the neural basis of learning, including: Behavioural analysis, computational modelling and in vivo brain imaging using 2-photon microscopy to measure neural activity within the different neural cell types of olfactory bulb.