Presentation Details
| Premotor control of preparatory activity in the gustatory cortex John Chen1, Elyse Brozost1, 2, Alfredo Fontanini1, 2. 1Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Stony Brook, NY, USA.2Program in Neuroscience, Stony Brook, NY, USA |
Abstract
The gustatory cortex (GC) is involved in processing cognitive signals related to a gustatory experience. In mice engaged in a delayed-response task where specific tastants guide directional licking, GC's activity has been found to progress from taste coding into preparatory coding predicting lick decisions. While preparatory and decision-related activity were consistently observed in GC, the neural mechanisms underlying these activity patterns have not been studied. The connections between GC and frontal premotor cortices involved in guiding goal-directed actions provide a putative source of preparatory signals to GC. A probable candidate in coordinating GC activity in the context of a delayed response task is the anterior-lateral motor cortex (ALM). This subregion of the mouse frontal cortex is involved in the planning and execution of goal-directed licking. In this study, we investigated the coordination between GC and ALM in a taste-based, delayed-response task where tastants instructed directional licking. We first anatomically identified direct ALM inputs in GC using AAV-based tracing approaches. We then performed simultaneous electrophysiological recordings during task performance and found preparatory activity emerged earlier in ALM than in GC. To determine if ALM is a source of preparatory signals to GC, we performed transient optogenetic inhibition of ALM during the delay period while recording GC activity. Inactivation of ALM reduced direction selective preparatory activity in GC, supporting a role for ALM as a source of such signals to GC. Our findings demonstrate that frontal premotor inputs significantly contribute to GC preparatory activity during taste-guided decision making.
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