Event-related functional MRI of awake behaving pigeons at 7T

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.

Metadaten
Author:	Mehdi Behroozi ORCiD GND, Xavier Helluy GND, Felix Ströckens ORCiD GND, Meng Gao GND, Roland Pusch ORCiD GND, Sepideh Tabrik GND, Martin Tegenthoff GND, Tobias Otto ORCiD GND, Nikolai Axmacher ORCiD GND, Robert Kumsta ORCiD GND, Dirk Moser ORCiD GND, Erhan Genç GND, Onur Güntürkün ORCiD GND
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:294-94337
DOI:	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18437-1
Parent Title (English):	Nature communications
Publisher:	Springer, Nature Publishing Group UK
Place of publication:	London
Document Type:	Article
Language:	English
Date of Publication (online):	2022/11/17
Date of first Publication:	2020/09/18
Publishing Institution:	Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsbibliothek
Volume:	11
Issue:	Article 4715
First Page:	4715-1
Last Page:	4715-12
Note:	Dieser Beitrag ist auf Grund des DEAL-Springer-Vertrages frei zugänglich.
Institutes/Facilities:	Institut für Kognitive Neurowissenschaft, Abteilung Biopsychologie
	Institut für kognitive Neurowissenschaften
Dewey Decimal Classification:	Philosophie und Psychologie / Psychologie
open_access (DINI-Set):	open_access
faculties:	Fakultät für Psychologie
Licence (English):	Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 - Attribution 4.0 International

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