Seneca Scott

Seneca ScottKatz Laboratory
Department of Psychology
Brandeis University

QHCl Lick Avoidance Is Dependent on Olfaction

Poster Abstract

Food’s hedonic value, coupled with an animal’s prior knowledge of that foods taste, drives decisions to sample or reject available food, which are critical to an animal’s survival and well-being. The Brief Access Task (BAT) is a behavioral assay designed to quantify a tastant’s hedonic value while eliminating an animal’s ability to identify tastants prior to being sampled assuming that the tastants cannot be smelled. However, my previous work suggests that rats may have been perceiving some olfactory characteristics of tastants prior to licking them, providing a means to avoid quinine (QHCl). We hypothesized that the rats were employing a chemosensory tag to mark lick spouts as they drank, or they were perceiving the olfactory characteristics of our supposedly-odorless tastants. To investigate, we randomly alternated delivery of vials of sucrose and QHCl differing number of times per vial, with and without a fan blowing, to disrupt olfaction. We revealed a significant difference in avoidance with and without a fan present F(1, 3) = 4.6, p < 0.05, concluding that QHCl avoidance behavior is likely due to rats perceiving chemosensory characteristics of QHCl. However, we cannot eliminate pheromonal marking as a possible secondary mechanism of avoidance behavior, as avoidance increases with prior presentation frequency.

Personal Statement

I’m Seneca Scott, a rising senior neuroscience major. Science research has been a great interest of mine since high school, when I was given the opportunity to design and perform basic science research projects through the International Baccalaureate Program. It became a passion of mine; I would often work in lab during lunch and after school. I loved the whole experience, especially the process of scientific inquiry—of having the freedom to ask interesting questions and develop ways to answer them. I decided I wanted to pursue science research in college, and potentially as a career. 

I came to Brandeis in part because I knew that Brandeis fostered an environment wherein undergraduates had access to fantastic research opportunities. In pursuit of those opportunities, I joined Katz Lab at the end of my freshman year. I’ve learned so much: how to perform brain surgery, how to read and understand scientific journal articles, how to design and perform a behavioral experiment. I’ve learned to collect, analyze, and display data, learned to make an argument using the language of science. Having had the opportunity to participate in real research as an undergraduate, I’m confident my interest in research science as a career is well-founded. I now plan to pursue a PhD in neuroscience after I graduate, with the ultimate goal of becoming a professor with my own lab. Though the road to accomplishing that goal is long, I can’t wait to chase the feelings of inquiry and discovery for years to come.