Sucrose intensity coding and decision-making in rat gustatory cortices
- CINVESTAV, Mexico
- National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
- Duke University, United States
Abstract
Sucrose's sweet intensity is one attribute contributing to the overconsumption of high-energy palatable foods. However, it is not known how sucrose intensity is encoded and used to make perceptual decisions by neurons in taste-sensitive cortices. We trained rats in a sucrose intensity discrimination task and found that sucrose evoked a widespread response in neurons recorded in posterior-Insula (pIC), anterior-Insula (aIC), and Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Remarkably, only a few Intensity-selective neurons conveyed the most information about sucrose's intensity, indicating that for sweetness the gustatory system used a compact and distributed code. Sucrose intensity was encoded in both firing-rates and spike-timing. The pIC, aIC, and OFC neurons tracked movement direction, with OFC neurons yielding the most robust response. aIC and OFC neurons encoded the subject's choices, whereas all three regions tracked reward omission. Overall, these multimodal areas provide a neural representation of perceived sucrose intensity, and of task-related information underlying perceptual decision-making.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files
Article and author information
Author details
Victor de Lafuente
Funding
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Problemas Nacionales 464)
- Ranier Gutierrez
Productos Medix (3247)
- Ranier Gutierrez
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (FOINS 63)
- Ranier Gutierrez
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (FOINS 245)
- Victor de Lafuente
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were approved by the CINVESTAV Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (#0034-13)
Copyright
© 2018, Fonseca et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Sucrose intensity coding and decision-making in rat gustatory cortices
eLife 7:e41152.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.41152
