Abstract
The purpose of perception is to drive action - during tasting, for instance, every stimulus necessarily drives either swallowing or ejecting (“gapes”). Taste responses in the rodent primary gustatory cortex (GC) span this sensorimotor divide, progressing through a series of firing rate epochs that culminate in the emergence of palatability-related firing. Population analyses reveal palatability-related activity to appear through sudden and coherent ensemble transitions that, despite occuring between 0.5s and 1.5s on individual trials, reliably precede gaping onset by 200-300ms. Here, we tested whether these transitions actually drive gaping, delivering 0.5s perturbations of GC at various points in tasting trials. Perturbations significantly delayed gaping, but only when they arrived before palatability coding. Thus, perturbation had no impact on trials in which the transition had already occurred, but the identical perturbation delayed gaping on trials in which it hadn’t. Our results suggest a distributed attractor network model of taste processing, and a dynamical role for cortex in driving motor behavior.