Project Details
Projekt
Prefrontal neuronal correlates of variability in continual learning
Applicant
Professor Dr. Jonas-Frederic Sauer
Subject Area
Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 437610067
Behavior is highly variable within and across individuals, including wide ranges of reaction times in task trials, experience-dependent differences in learning speed, and the strategies used to solve a task. During the first funding period of FOR, we identified temporally stable activity patterns in the prefrontal cortex as mice learned an olfaction-guided decision making task, suggesting that the mPFC forms a stable reference frame of the task structure. In this proposal, we aim to investigate how such prefrontal activity patterns might govern behavioral variability. We will address that question by relating prefrontal activity assessed by 1-photon (1-P) calcium imaging with intra- and inter-individual behavioral variabilities as mice are challenged to flexibly update the rules that guide decision making. Specifically, we will follow the same neurons over time and extract single neuron tuning to external variables (e.g., space, cue identity) as well as population activity motifs (e.g., geometry of the population activity). This approach allows us to monitor the same neuronal population as the animals learn rule changes and therefore puts us in the position to study the dynamics of defined populations in relation to intra- and inter-individual variability in learning (e.g., experience- and task stage-dependence, across-animals performance). The project will test the hypothesis that variations in neuronal tuning to task-relevant events and in population activity contribute to variability at the level of behavior.
DFG Programme
Research Units
