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| Poster #304 A novel approach to investigating anticipatory cortical responses to taste associated cues |
| Emma A Barash, Usha Berger, Donald B Katz Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, United States |
Survival is inextricably tied to consumption decisions; ingestion of toxic foods cause illness/death, while nutrient-rich foods promote health. Thus, it is paramount to understand how food cues (e.g., the color of a fruit) guide approach-avoidance decisions regarding potentially nourishing (or sickening) foods. While cue-driven-association research is common, it is still unclear whether cue-associations evoke sensory codes. To bridge this gap, we created a novel experimental framework aimed at training cue-food reward associations in an electrophysiology-friendly manner that enables us to separate the effects of a reward’s valence from its identity. We designed a paradigm featuring cue-trigger/retrieval-reward sequencing, pairing visual-auditory cues with unique chemosensory taste concentrations — palatable sucrose and sodium chloride, and aversive sodium chloride. Across several sessions, rats come to subtly adapt their approach or avoidance to cues based on reward palatability. As satiation increased during sessions, individual preferences emerged even among the palatable options, leading to stratification in total consumption by the session's end. Preliminary electrophysiological data from gustatory cortical (GC) neurons reveal, prior to taste delivery, clear responses that predict GC responses to the tastes themselves, but in reverse—strong taste responses predicted by weak cue responses, and vice-versa. Integration of behavioral and electrophysiological data allows us to investigate how the neural encoding of “anticipatory responses” in GC correlates with true taste responses in terms of identity and palatability. |