Weergave van olfactorische kenmerken langs het cortico-hippocampale pad

Curiosity refers to the intrinsic tendency of all animals to explore the unknown. The type of curiosity which is evoked by the novelty of sensory stimuli, is referred to as perceptual curiosity. It critically relies on the animals' ability to identify the novelty of a sensory stimulus against the set of previously experienced, familiar stimuli in memory. Previous research in primates, humans and rodents has identified brain areas related to novelty processing. However, the mechanism for how the mammalian brain detects novel stimuli remains unknown today. This can be accounted for in part by the limitations of commonly studied behavioral paradigms in rodents, which do not allow psychophysical analysis of behavior. In my PhD, I aim to address this issue, by stablishing an operant olfactory novelty detection task in mice. I will set up a two-alternative forced choice task in head-fixed mice navigating a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. I will then perform chronic, large-scale single-unit recordings and optogenetically identified recordings of GABAergic and glutamatergic neurons in olfactory cortex and the lateral entorhinal cortex, two key brain areas implicated in the processing of olfactory stimuli. Finally, I will use computational modeling to relate observed neural activity patterns to computational frameworks of novelty detection. My PhD project thus provides a platform to identify the mechanistic principles of the neural computation underlying novelty detection