Presentation Details
Longitudinal Analysis of Taste Representational Drift in the Gustatory Cortex

Martin A Raymond, John D Boughter, Max L Fletcher.

University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, TN

Abstract


Recent studies have revealed that cortical ensemble activity evoked by a given stimulus changes over time. This phenomenon, termed representational drift, has been observed in various sensory systems, including olfaction and vision. It is unknown if drift occurs in gustatory cortex taste ensembles and how this impacts taste and valence coding over time. In this study, we explored the extent of drift in gustatory cortex taste representations using miniscope recordings in freely moving mice exposed to a panel of appetitive and aversive tastes (sucrose, NaCl, citric acid, quinine, and water) once a week for five weeks. We monitored the activity of over 700 cells (present in all recording sessions) from five mice. To quantify drift in taste coding, we compared pooled and averaged taste responses within and across sessions for all tastes using vector correlations, principal component analysis, and within and across-day classification analysis. Similar to other sensory systems, our findings indicate that cortical taste representations drift over time, with across-day correlations of individual tastes decreasing linearly with increasing time intervals. Similarly, classifiers trained on early sessions perform progressively worse at taste identification when tested on data from later sessions. While this drift appears to occur at a consistent rate for each taste, the directionality of the drift is non-random as representations of appetitive tastes further diverge from representations of aversive tastes with time. Together, these findings suggest that drift in taste representations may be influenced by both time and experience. Ongoing work is focused on further delineating the influence of each on representational drift.

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