Mazen kheirbek seminar Dec 14th, UCL

[Andrew Macaskill]

Dear all,

Just a reminder that we have the fantastic Mazen Kheirbek visiting UCL on Dec 14th from USCF. Mazen investigates the circuit basis of innate and learned emotional behaviours.

Mazen Kheirbek

Title: 'Representing rewarding and aversive experiences in ventral hippocampal circuits'

1 pm Dec 14th 2023

AV Hill Lecture Theatre

Medical Sciences Building, UCL

map here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps/av-hill

lab website: https://kheirbeklab.org/

Full details are here :

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/biosciences/events/2023/dec/npp-seminar-associate-professor-kheirbek-ucsf-university-california-san-francisco

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss our recent efforts to understand how meaningful stimuli are represented in hippocampal circuits. First, I will discuss experiments using two-photon calcium imaging to track the same dCA1 and vCA1 neurons across days to determine how responses evolve across phases of odor–outcome learning. We found that odors elicited robust responses in dCA1, whereas, in vCA1, odor responses primarily emerged after learning and embedded information about the paired outcome. Population activity in both regions rapidly reorganized with learning and then stabilized, storing learned odor representations for days, even after extinction or pairing with a different outcome. Then we examined how unconditioned stimuli are represented in the hippocampus. We demonstrate that ensembles of vCA1 neurons represent the identity, sensory features, and intensity of conditioned and unconditioned salient stimuli, but not their overall valence. Stimulus representations within a sensory modality are more similar to one another than across modalities, and within the taste modality, we find vCA1 groups together stimuli that recruit the same taste pathway. Finally, I will discuss recent work using high-density electrophysiology to investigate how ventral hippocampal-amygdala interactions may modulate reward seeking after chronic stress. These results will show how the hippocampus encodes, stores and updates information and illuminates the unique contributions of the ventral hippocampus.

Academic Host: Andrew Macaskill

Please reach out if you would like to meet with the speakers, or have any questions.

Best 

Andrew