Brain-wide cell assembly patterns for memory-guided behaviour

Thesis

The brain uses functionally specialized regions to represent information in the sensory, motor, and cognitive domains. How does the brain integrate discrete representations spread across the brain to drive effective behaviour?

I trained male mice to approach or avoid a dispenser delivering either rewarding or aversive outcomes contingent on sets of visual and auditory cues. I found that groups of neurons scattered across the hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area cooperate to form cross-regional firing patterns of millisecond-timescale coactivity. These distributed assembly patterns report multimodal task-cue contingencies and require a common input from glutamatergic VTA neurons to support the expression of appropriate behaviour in our task relying on the integration of multiple external cues. Our findings uncover a diverging glutamatergic VTA pathway for organizing multiple local representations into brain-wide cell assemblies, dynamically adapting behaviour to environmental contingencies.

Authors: Rothaermel, R

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Assemblies; VTA; memory; distributed processing; dopamine; glutamate
• Subjects: Neurosciences