BRAIN EAGER: Flashes of insight: Revealing dynamic mental models during rodent virtual reality foraging

Baylor College Of Medicine, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

A primary goal of neuroscience is to understand how the brain works-- not in artificial lab tasks, but when using its full capabilities to thrive in the rigors of the natural environment. Neuroscience has made enormous progress by examining how the brain performs simplified tasks, but these tasks do not expose the richly adaptive dynamics that the brain must use in a changing world. Therefore, the current neuroscientific understanding of the brain is missing fundamental ingredients. The current project begins to fill this gap, providing a new paradigm for the conduct of behavioral neuroscience and offering an unprecedented opportunity to observe the neural computations that solve a complex natural task. Team members will record activity of many neurons in multiple areas of a mouse brain while the mouse is foraging in a virtual reality environment, and develop mathematical models to make sense of the complex data. This research will thereby provide a unique training opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students in both computational and experimental neuroscience. The project results will be widely disseminated by sharing data, computational models, and analysis techniques with the neuroscience community through public data repositories, so conclusions can be replicated and extended. This research will thereby advance society?s goals of understanding the biology of healthy and disordered brains, with the ultimate hope of repairing neurological problems. Experimenters will train mice to forage in a virtual reality environment, while recording activity from many neurons in four brain areas involved in vision and navigation: visual cortex, entorhinal cortex, posterior parietal cortex and hippocampus. State-of-the-art analysis techniques will be used to describe the mouse's behavior, and to discover neural representations of the internal models that express the animal's beliefs about things that cannot be observed directly in sense data. Finally, the project will uncover how neural representations of critical task variables are communicated and transformed across brain areas, guided by the hidden variable dynamics of the behavioral model. Together, these experiments, theory, and analysis will provide an unprecedented, system-wide understanding of neural computation, ranging from the scale of individual neurons up to a multi-region system. A key quality of the approach is the pervasive influence of theory, both in structuring experiments and dictating analyses. Since the great strength of the human brain is its ability to comprehend the hidden structure in the world, this approach takes an essential step toward unraveling the mysteries of cognition.