Impact of precisely-timed inhibition of gustatory cortex on taste behavior depends on single-trial ensemble dynamics

• Published in: eLife Vol. 8
• Main Authors: Mukherjee, Narendra, Wachutka, Joseph, Katz, Donald B
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 24.06.2019; eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
• Subjects: Action Potentials; Animals; Behavior, Animal; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; chemosensation; cortex; Cortex (gustatory); Cortex (motor); Cortex (somatosensory); Information processing; Latency; Models, Neurological; Motor Activity; Neuroscience; optogenetics; Perception; population dynamics; Rats, Long-Evans; sensorimotor transformation; Taste; Taste Perception; cortex; rat; chemosensation; neuroscience; optogenetics; taste; sensorimotor transformation; population dynamics
• ISSN: 2050-084X; 2050-084X
• DOI: 10.7554/eLife.45968

Sensation and action are necessarily coupled during stimulus perception - while tasting, for instance, perception happens while an animal decides to expel or swallow the substance in the mouth (the former a behavior known as 'gaping'). Taste responses in the rodent gustatory cortex (GC) span this sensorimotor divide, progressing through firing-rate epochs that culminate in the emergence of action-related firing. Population analyses reveal this emergence to be a sudden, coherent and variably-timed ensemble transition that reliably precedes gaping onset by 0.2-0.3s. Here, we tested whether this transition drives gaping, by delivering 0.5s GC perturbations in tasting trials. Perturbations significantly delayed gaping, but only when they preceded the action-related transition - thus, the same perturbation impacted behavior or not, depending on the transition latency in that particular trial. Our results suggest a distributed attractor network model of taste processing, and a dynamical role for cortex in driving motor behavior.