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- Title
Event-related functional MRI of awake behaving pigeons at 7T.
- Authors
Behroozi, Mehdi; Helluy, Xavier; Ströckens, Felix; Gao, Meng; Pusch, Roland; Tabrik, Sepideh; Tegenthoff, Martin; Otto, Tobias; Axmacher, Nikolai; Kumsta, Robert; Moser, Dirk; Genc, Erhan; Güntürkün, Onur
- Abstract
Animal-fMRI is a powerful method to understand neural mechanisms of cognition, but it remains a major challenge to scan actively participating small animals under low-stress conditions. Here, we present an event-related functional MRI platform in awake pigeons using single-shot RARE fMRI to investigate the neural fundaments for visually-guided decision making. We established a head-fixated Go/NoGo paradigm, which the animals quickly learned under low-stress conditions. The animals were motivated by water reward and behavior was assessed by logging mandibulations during the fMRI experiment with close to zero motion artifacts over hundreds of repeats. To achieve optimal results, we characterized the species-specific hemodynamic response function. As a proof-of-principle, we run a color discrimination task and discovered differential neural networks for Go-, NoGo-, and response execution-phases. Our findings open the door to visualize the neural fundaments of perceptual and cognitive functions in birds—a vertebrate class of which some clades are cognitively on par with primates. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful method to understand neural mechanisms of cognition but imaging of small animals can be challenging. The authors present an event-related fMRI platform to visualize the neural fundaments of perceptual and cognitive functions in awake birds.
- Subjects
PIGEONS; COLOR vision; COGNITIVE ability; FUNCTIONAL magnetic resonance imaging; LEARNING in animals
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2020, Vol 11, Issue 1, pN.PAG
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-020-18437-1