MULTIMODAL SENSORY CUE BASED NOVELTY DETECTION IN CA1
1 IEECR
Novelty is an attribute of a stimulus that lacks a pre-existing representation and novelty detection involves a series of interrelated processes, each playing a unique role. Different medial temporal lobe structures including the hippocampus have been highly implicated to play a major role in novelty detection. In this project, we aim to understand how CA1 of the hippocampus encodes novelty and familiarity signals induced by unimodal and multimodal sensory stimuli and what are the processes that mediate the transition between novelty and familiarity. We plan to use a multisensory cue delivery setup including a novel behavioral paradigm for mouse models where we can introduce different individual sensory modalities in a fast quantifiable way, coupled with 2-photon imaging of CA1 neuronal cell bodies and axonal inputs from Entorhinal Cortex (EC) and CA3 to CA1. We hope our findings will shed some light on how CA1 responds to distinct perceptual novelty processing stages like absolute novelty processing, novelty due to recency, and sensory surprise and also will help us determine the threshold of change in different sensory stimuli that induce novelty signals in CA1.