1 Impact of precisely-timed inhibition of gustatory cortex 2 on taste behavior depends on single-trial ensemble 3 dynamics ∗1 2 y3 4 Narendra Mukherjee , Joseph Wachukta , and Donald B Katz 1,2,3 5 Program in Neuroscience, Brandeis University 1,2,3 6 Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University 3 7 Department Of Psychology, Brandeis University 8 Abstract 9 Sensation and action are necessarily coupled during stimulus perception – while tasting, 10 for instance, perception happens while an animal decides to expel or swallow the substance 11 in the mouth (the former via a behavior known as “gaping”). Taste responses in the ro- 12 dent gustatory cortex (GC) span this sensorimotor divide, progressing through firing-rate 13 epochs that culminate in the emergence of action-related firing. Population analyses re- 14 veal this emergence to be a sudden, coherent and variably-timed ensemble transition that 15 reliably precedes gaping onset by 0.2-0.3s. Here, we tested whether this transition drives 16 gaping, by delivering 0.5s GC perturbations in tasting trials. Perturbations significantly 17 delayed gaping, but only when they preceded the action-related transition - thus, the same 18 perturbation impacted behavior or not, depending on the transition latency in that partic- 19 ular trial. Our results suggest a distributed attractor network model of taste processing, 20 and a dynamical role for cortex in driving motor behavior. ∗
[email protected] [email protected] 1 21 1 Introduction 22 One of the primary purposes of sensory processing is to drive action, such that the source 23 of sensory information is either acquired or avoided (in the process generating new sensory 24 input, Prinz(1997), Wolpert and Kawato(1998), Wolpert and Ghahramani(2000)).