Animal-fMRI is a powerful method to understand neural mechanisms of cognition, but it remains a major challenge to scan actively participating small animals under low-stress conditions. Here, we present an event-related functional MRI platform in awake pigeons using single-shot RARE fMRI to investigate the neural fundaments for visually-guided decision making. We established a head-fixated Go/NoGo paradigm, which the animals quickly learned under low-stress conditions. The animals were motivated by water reward and behavior was assessed by logging mandibulations during the fMRI experiment with close to zero motion artifacts over hundreds of repeats. To achieve optimal results, we characterized the species-specific hemodynamic response function. As a proof-of-principle, we run a color discrimination task and discovered differential neural networks for Go-, NoGo-, and response execution-phases. Our findings open the door to visualize the neural fundaments of perceptual and cognitive functions in birds—a vertebrate class of which some clades are cognitively on par with primates.

动物功能磁共振成像是一种了解认知神经机制的有力方法，但在低压力条件下扫描积极参与的小动物仍然是一项重大挑战。在这里，我们使用单次 RARE fMRI 在清醒鸽子中展示了一个事件相关的功能 MRI 平台，以研究视觉引导决策的神经基础。我们建立了一个头部固定的 Go/NoGo 范式，动物在低压力条件下很快就学会了。动物受到水奖励的激励，行为是通过在 fMRI 实验中记录下颌骨来评估的，在数百次重复中运动伪影接近于零。为了获得最佳结果，我们对物种特异性血流动力学响应函数进行了表征。作为原理证明，我们运行了一个颜色辨别任务，并发现了 Go、NoGo 和响应执行阶段的差分神经网络。我们的研究结果为可视化鸟类感知和认知功能的神经基础打开了大门——这是一种脊椎动物，其中一些进化枝在认知上与灵长类动物相当。