Abstract:
In a natural setting, sensory awareness aids the animal in evaluating its surroundings
and making appropriate judgments. The results of these choices have an impact on
the animal's habitat survival and fitness. Rodents primarily rely on their olfactory
system to get information and carry out necessary tasks for their survival, including
finding possible mates, foraging, navigating, seeing predators, etc. Based on a well-
known Go/No-Go olfactory behavioural paradigm, we train mice in our lab to execute
detection and discriminating tasks. Water-deprived animals learn to lick for rewarded
stimuli (reward being water) and to refrain from licking for non-rewarded input. Animals
gradually develop the ability to distinguish between odour stimuli that are rewarded
and those that are not. However, a preliminary study from the lab shows that animals
that execute as accurately as possible respond to certain unrewarding stimuli by
licking and quickly stop responding. These quick licking reactions may be the result of
inadequate stimulus percept generation, in which a preliminary judgement was made
prior to thorough processing and integration of the incoming stimulus. In order to
characterize this behavior, we carried out Go/No-Go odor discrimination tasks and
established a means to record these anomalies as reversal trials with its own set of
characteristics. Further experiments were carried out to look at the significance of an
odor vs a diluent in an odor discrimination task. This project aimed at attempting to
quantify and characterize the properties of reversal trials and this phenomenon
overall. Our findings call for further experiments to dissect out the physiological
mechanism and behavioural impact of the same which will help us establishing this
property as a usable readout to quantify finer subtleties in the decision making
process.
