A Circuit-Based Analysis of Behavioural Habituation

Animals learn to associate cues in their environment with a potential rewarding/aversive experience; e.g. the presence of food, a potential mate, or a predator. However, many cues have no current relevance and learning to ignore these is equally important for adaptive behaviour, a process termed "habituation". Whilst parts of the brain have been identified as being important for habituation, questions remain as to how these areas interact to guide an animal's behaviour. Brain areas involved in habituation have been shown to increase in activity when an animal is introduced to an environment with novel cues, and quickly reduce as the animal learns to ignore irrelevant features of the context. However, precise mechanisms of how this happens are still unknown. This is potentially important as there is also increasing evidence that impaired habituation processes may be a feature of several brain disorders and may cause some of the symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders. This project will probe circuits relevant to this process, by combining behavioural tests of habituation with techniques for recording and manipulating the activity of neurons and neural circuits in mice.

WCUB, ENWW