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

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Abstract

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 via 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.

Data availability

We have structured our electrophysiology datasets in a hierarchical data format (HDF5) and are hosting the files on a university-wide network share managed by Library and Technology Services (LTS) at Brandeis University. These HDF5 files contain our electrophysiology recordings, sorted spikes, single-neuron and population-level analyses (and associated plots and results). These files are prohibitively large to be hosted on a general-purpose fileshare platform - we request anyone interested in our datasets to contact the corresponding author, Donald Katz (dbkatz@brandeis.edu) who can put them in touch with LTS in order to create a guest account at Brandeis through which they can securely access our datasets (hosted on the katz-lab share at files.brandeis.edu).

Article and author information

Author details

Narendra Mukherjee

Program in Neuroscience, Brandeis University, Waltham, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3808-2622
Joseph Wachutka

Program in Neuroscience, Brandeis University, Waltham, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Donald B Katz

Department Of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, United States

For correspondence
dbkatz@brandeis.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8444-6063

Funding

NIH Office of the Director (R01 DC006666-00)

Donald B Katz

National Science Foundation (IBN170002)

Donald B Katz

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (International Student Research Fellowship)

Narendra Mukherjee

NIH Office of the Director (R01 DC007703-06)

Donald B Katz

National Science Foundation (IBN180002)

Donald B Katz

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with National Institute of Health guidelines and methods were approved in advance by the Brandeis University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee in protocol numbers 15011 and 19002.

Copyright

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.