@article {68773,
	title = {Meta-learning in head fixed mice navigating in virtual reality: A Behavioral Analysis},
	journal = {bioRxiv},
	year = {2023},
	month = {2023 May 02},
	abstract = {<p>Animals can learn general task structures and use them to solve new problems with novel sensory specifics. This capacity of {\textquoteleft}learning to learn{\textquoteright}, or meta-learning, is difficult to achieve in artificial systems, and the mechanisms by which it is achieved in animals are unknown. As a step toward enabling mechanistic studies, we developed a behavioral paradigm that demonstrates meta-learning in head-fixed mice. We trained mice to perform a two-alternative forced-choice task in virtual reality (VR), and successively changed the visual cues that signaled reward location. Mice showed increased learning speed in both cue generalization and serial reversal tasks. During reversal learning, behavior exhibited sharp transitions, with the transition occurring earlier in each successive reversal. Analysis of motor patterns revealed that animals utilized similar motor programs to execute the same actions in response to different cues but modified the motor programs during reversal learning. Our study demonstrates that mice can perform meta-learning tasks in VR, thus opening up opportunities for future mechanistic studies.</p>
},
	doi = {10.1101/2023.05.01.538936},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.01.538936},
	author = {Xinyu Zhao and Rachel Gattoni and Andrea Kozlosky and Angela Jacobs and Colin Morrow and Sarah Lindo and Nelson Spruston}
}
@article {67767,
	title = {Rapid synaptic plasticity contributes to a learned conjunctive code of position and choice-related information in the hippocampus},
	journal = {Neuron},
	year = {2021},
	month = {2021 Oct 14},
	abstract = {<p>To successfully perform goal-directed navigation, animals must know where they are and what they are doing{\textemdash}e.g., looking for water, bringing food back to the nest, or escaping from a predator. Hippocampal neurons code for these critical variables conjunctively, but little is known about how this where/what code is formed or flexibly routed to other brain regions. To address these questions, we performed intracellular whole-cell recordings in mouse CA1 during a cued, two-choice virtual navigation task. We demonstrate that plateau potentials in CA1 pyramidal neurons rapidly strengthen synaptic inputs carrying conjunctive information about position and choice. Plasticity-induced response fields were modulated by cues only in animals previously trained to collect rewards based on these cues. Thus, we reveal that gradual learning is required for the formation of a conjunctive population code, upstream of CA1, while plateau-potential-induced synaptic plasticity in CA1 enables flexible routing of the code to downstream brain regions.</p>
},
	doi = {https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.30.450574},
	author = {Xinyu Zhao and Ching-Lung Hsu and Nelson Spruston}
}
