Presentation Details
The Role of Component Reliability in Behavioral and Neural Response to Bimodal Flavor Mixtures

Isabella B Allar, Alex Hua, Joost X Maier.

Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

Abstract


Flavor perception results from integration of multiple sensory inputs, including taste and odor. One site where this integration occurs is the gustatory cortex (GC), but the computations are still unknown. In line with findings from other multisensory systems, we hypothesized that reliability of the components of a taste-odor mixture are crucial in determining integration. We measured behavioral and neural responses to taste-smell mixtures and components. Reliability was varied by changing concentration of the taste component (10 or 40 mM sucrose); the odor component was constant (0.025% amyl acetate). Behavioral responses were measured as consumption in a series of two-bottle preference tests (mixture or component versus water). Neural responses to the same solutions delivered via intra-oral cannulae were measured as spiking activity of single GC neurons in awake behaving rats. Behavioral results show that preferences for mixtures are a weighted average of component preferences. Low taste concentrations yielded more variable preferences and carried less weight in determining mixture preferences compared to high taste concentrations. At the neural level, single-unit responses (n=143 excitatory responses) to mixtures were intermediate to their component responses. Responses to mixtures with high taste concentration were closer to taste responses while responses to mixtures with low taste concentration were closer to odor responses. Similarity between mixture and component responses could not be explained by the strength of the component responses, suggesting that the integrative operation does not result from input strength, but circuit- or network-level interactions. In conclusion, component reliability affects integration of multisensory flavor mixtures at the behavioral and neural levels. 

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