Question 1. In Aronov et al. (2017), the authors used a task where rats press a

Question

Question 1. In Aronov et al. (2017), the authors used a task where rats press a lever to turn on a sound that gradually increases in frequency as long as the lever is depressed; the rat must release the lever at the appropriate frequency to obtain a reward. a. What was the purpose of having the rats do this task? What conclusion did the authors make from these experiments? b. Why is it important that the sound frequency increased at different rates during different trials? c. Why is it important that the authors also conducted a separate experiment where rats heard the same types of sound stimuli but were not performing any task

Explanation / Answer

In Aronov et al (2017) the author used a task where rats press a lever to turn on a sound that gradually increases in frequency as long as the lever is depressed, the rat must release the lever at the appropriate frequency to obtain a reward.

1. The purpose of having rat to do the task was rats are small creatures. they are easy to handle, transport and conduct experiment on unlike largeror less predictable animals. Biologically rats are formidable breeders. they breed quite fast as compared to other animals. they have short life span thus providing different generations in short life span of years. Rats are also preferred as they have remarkable similarity to humans. Rats share staggering 90% of genes with humans. This is why they represent the best way to test the nature of different gene interactions in humans. Also, many bodily systems of rats perform very much like human beings, which makes it even more convenient to study the effect of all sorts of drugs and medications on the human body.

b & c .Conclusion that the author made from these experiment:-

Representations of physical space are highly specialized; yet, memory is a general function that requires processing a variety of other types of information by the hippocampal/entorhinal circuit. A conceptual framework reconciling these views is that spatial representation is one example of a general mechanism for encoding continuous, task-relevant variables. We tested this idea explicitly by training rats to navigate in an acoustic version of a virtual environment. Rats pressed a joystick lever to increase the frequency of a sound and were required to release the joystick in a target range of frequencies to obtain a reward. To uncouple frequency from the amount of elapsed time we varied, on a trial-by-trial basis, the “speed” of traversal through the frequency space. Remarkably, both hippocampal and entorhinal neurons formed discrete firing fields that spanned the entire behavioral task, even though animals were immobile. Some cells formed fields at particular sound frequencies, forming “frequency fields” akin to place and grid fields during spatial navigation. This suggests a more general purpose for the hippocampal and entorhinal firing patterns and implies their role in cognitive processes beyond spatial navigation.

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