Present affiliation: Department of Neurobiology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States.
Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2024 Sep;213:107951. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2024.107951. Epub 2024 Jun 4.
We have developed a behavioral paradigm to study volitional olfactory investigation in mice over several months. We placed odor ports in the wall of a standard cage that administer a neutral odorant stimulus when a mouse pokes its nose inside. Even though animals were fed and watered ad libitum, and sampling from the port elicited no outcome other than the delivery of an odor, mice readily sampled these stimuli hundreds of times per day. This self-paced olfactory investigation persisted for weeks with only modest habituation following the first day of exposure to a given set of odorants. If an unexpected odorant stimulus was administered at the port, the sampling rate increased transiently (in the first 20 min) by an order of magnitude and remained higher than baseline throughout the subsequent day, indicating learned implicit knowledge. Thus, this system may be used to study naturalistic olfactory learning over extended time scales outside of conventional task structures.
我们开发了一种行为范式来研究老鼠在几个月内的自愿嗅觉探究。我们在标准笼子的墙上放置了气味端口，当老鼠将鼻子伸进端口时，会给予一种中性的气味刺激。尽管动物可以自由进食和饮水，并且从端口采样除了输送气味外没有任何结果，但老鼠每天都很乐意进行数百次采样。这种自我调节的嗅觉探究持续了数周，只有在第一天接触一组特定气味后才会适度习惯化。如果在端口给予意外的气味刺激，采样率会在最初的 20 分钟内增加一个数量级，并在随后的一整天内保持高于基线的水平，表明存在学习的内隐知识。因此，该系统可用于在传统任务结构之外的扩展时间范围内研究自然的嗅觉学习。
