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The overarching goal of Dr. Haleh Fotowat's research is to discover neural mechanisms that underlie sensory-evoked natural behaviors. Specifically, she is interested in characterizing neural mechanisms that link an animal’s behavioral response to its past experience and internal state.

"Neural Mechanisms Underlying Habituation of Escape Behaviors"

Science Trivia- 4pm
Talk Begins- 4:10pm

Habituation, i.e. the diminishing reactions to repetitive sensory stimulation is considered the most basic form of learning, enabling the animal to ignore stimuli that are found irrelevant through experience and to tune in to relevant and/or novel stimuli. Although habituation has been studied extensively in invertebrates and/or in neural networks consisting of small number of identified neurons, the neural mechanisms that underlie habituation of behaviors that rely on larger, distributed networks of neurons remains elusive. Here we study this phenomenon in, larval zebrafish, which escape in response to simulated predators i.e. 2D dark expanding shadows (looming stimuli). a behavior which persists as directed tail flicks in head-embedded larvae. We found that with stimulus repetition, such escape behavior is reduced in intensity and eventually ceases in an inter-stimulus-interval dependent manner. Using two-photon calcium imaging we identified various neuronal populations that exhibited distinct stimulus-response properties and repetition dependent dynamics. These included neurons that reduced their activity as well as ones that increased their activity with stimulus repetition. Habituation may therefore be implemented not only through an overall reduction in network activity, but also via active suppression of neural activity in the course of learning

Open to the public (contact gonyerk@reed.edu for the Zoom link & password)

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