Behavior depends on both the external environment and how subjects interpret that environment. One factor in that interpretation is past experience: subjects use past experience to anticipate sensory events and plan appropriate motor actions. Preliminary findings suggest that sensory signals in visual cortex are modulated according to the anticipation of behaviorally relevant events. The proposed experiments explore the effects of task anticipation on the processing of visual information and the planning of visually guided behaviors. Animals will be trained in tasks with fixed timings to encourage the formation and use of a specific temporal strategy. Simultaneous neural recording and behavioral measurements will reveal how these strategies affect behavioral performance and the neuronal signals underlying that performance. These studies have three specific aims. In the first specific aim, the effect of strategies on sensory processing will be studied in animals that have been trained in a motion detection task in which motion appearance is determined, by a consistent and periodic probability function. In the second specific aim, the effect of strategies on motor planning will be studied in animals that have been trained to produce regular eye movements in the absence of sensory cues. In the third specific aim, the nature and distribution of strategy related signals would be studied by comparing the responses of nearby cells during the performance of these tasks. Because these studies address internal task representations that have formed as a consequence of training, the experiments will provide valuable information on the neuronal representation of acquired knowledge. Additionally, by elucidating how strategies are used and implemented during normal behavior, these studies could provide important information for the development of treatments for a variety of learning and cognitive disorders.
