RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Sucrose intensity coding and decision-making in rat gustatory cortices
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 391342
DO 10.1101/391342
A1 Esmeralda Fonseca
A1 Victor de Lafuente
A1 Sidney A. Simon
A1 Ranier Gutierrez
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/16/391342.abstract
AB 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.