March 13th
Pamela Reinagel
Dept of Neurobiology
UC San Diego
Visual Cognition in Rats
Abstract. Until recently it was widely presumed that rodents like mice and rats have only rudimentary visual capabilities. Yet the larger mammals commonly used for visiual neuroscience research are difficult or intractable preparations for many powerful techniques, such as transgentics, optigenetics, imaging, and large scale high resolution miscroscopy. Therefore we surveyed several rodent species to identify a small rodent model suitable for vision research. To our surprise, the pigmented Norway rat has emerged as an outstanding performer in visual behavior experiments. In the first part of this talk I will describe our paradigm for training rats to perform two-alternative forced-choice visual discriminations, and show several of the visual tasks that rats can reliably perform in this paradigm (see Meier, Flister and Reinagel 2011; Clark, Reingel et al, 2011; Meier and Reinagel 2011). In the second part of the talk, I will describe in detail two examples of how we have used quantitative rat visual behavior to probe questions about higher visual processing and sensory decision making.
http://www-biology.ucsd.edu/labs/reinagel/
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