Analysis of electrophysiological signals during temporal learning

• Grant number: 21/02377-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2021
• End date: February 20, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Biophysics - Biophysics of Processes and Systems
• Principal Investigator: Marcelo Bussotti Reyes
• Grantee: Luis Fernando Fontoura de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/14742-8 - Ordinal pattern analysis and pseudo transfer entropy in local field potential recordings, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

Temporal perception and the ability to time behaviour are crucial for animals to survive. Several authors posit that interval production within hundreds of milliseconds to tens of seconds is entrusted both to the striatum (STR) and prefrontal cortex (PFC). Our groups' recent results, on the other hand, point to a distinction in their roles during temporal learning: the PFC leads interval acquisition phase, whereas the STR manages its production after learning (Chiuffa-Tunes et al., 2020). It is not yet settled, however, how time encoding migrates from the PFC to the STR. In this project, the student intends to analyse firing rates and local field potential signals more attentively, in order to detail this transition throughout the interval acquisition. The animals' electrophysiological recordings will be categorized according to three indices: 1) the sequentiality of its firings in each region, 2) the similarity of its firing rates prior to and after learning, and also of 3) the coupling among frequencies of its local field potentials in each region and between regions. It is hoped for that these evaluations will better characterize how learning manifests itself in terms of neuronal activity, and advance the comprehension of its dynamics' reorderings throughout the learning processes.