DailyExperiments, Kyriazi et al 2018

 So I am shifting the focus of my regular posts from simply papers to cataloging specific experiments that I find in the literature. This is a subtle shift in emphasis. I want to learn to think more like an experimental neuroscientist. Since I want to join an amygdala lab in the future, my summaries will mostly concern  amygdala experiments. I think experimental design is one of the most subtle and intricate intellectual tasks in science. I've never done it, but I find it highly appealing and gratifying. The link between designing a task and elucidating some particular aspect of neural function is so elusive. I want to practice making this link in my mind and what better way to do it than collecting a collection of experimental paradigms from the literature, i.e. exposing myself to experiments in written form, of course. In the future, I would like to design and execute my own experiments. 

So I start with a paper I really like, "Multi-dimensional coding by basolateral amygdala neurons", Kyriazi et al 2018, Neuron. 

There's a box that the mouse is placed in and there are five lights that act as a conditioned stimulus (CS), a stimulus predicting a reward or shock. The locations of the light shown in blue on the drawing correspond to a reward delivery at that location. The red locations correspond to a light going off on the floor in these sectors and it indicated an imminent shock delivery to that sector. 

What is interesting about this task is that the task permitted to monitor both the neural correlates of reward and fear encoding, because shocks and rewards were delivered intermittently. Thus, the task was designed to assess how BLA neurons encode these variables and they found that neurons encode a mixture of these variables, i.e. neurons code for these contradictory aspects. 

That's it, folks! I'm going to keep these posts brief and to the point! The goal, as I said, is just to collect and catalog a whole bunch of experiments in the literature. I want to get inspiration for designing my own experiments:-)