Dr. Qiaojie Xiong (Stony Brook University)

TITLE: Integration of the auditory and spatial information in an auditory decision

ABSTRACT: Sensory processing, such as audition, guides daily behaviors, including decision-making—the flexible transformation of information from the outside world into planned action. How our brains integrate sensory information and transform it to proper motor actions is of great interest in my laboratory. In general, sensory stimuli are processed through ascending sensory systems, and motor actions are planned and executed through descending motor systems. How the sensory and motor systems exchange information to produce accurate sensory-guided action is complex and remains largely elusive. The dorsal striatum has emerged as a key player in sensory-guided, reward-driven decisions. A posterior sub-region of the dorsal striatum, the auditory striatum, receives convergent projections from both auditory cortex and thalamus. One project in my laboratory is to examine how auditory striatum integrate auditory information from thalamic and cortical inputs in mouse performing an auditory frequency discrimination task. Many sensory-guided behaviors require navigating to goal locations. How the neural circuit associates sensory decisions to goal locations remains largely unknown. The dentate gyrus is critical for spatial discrimination, which makes it a potential brain substrate for linking sensory decisions to spatial navigation. Here we develop an auditory-cued navigation-required task to investigate how dentate granule cells of hippocampus link the auditory decision to spatial navigation.