Differential Rapid Plasticity in Auditory and Visual Responses in the Primarily Multisensory Orbitofrontal Cortex.

Abstract

Given the connectivity of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) with the sensory areas and areas involved in goal execution, it is likely that OFC, along with its function in reward processing, also has a role to play in perception-based multisensory decision-making. To understand mechanisms involved in multisensory decision-making, it is important to first know the encoding of different sensory stimuli in single neurons of the mouse OFC. Ruling out effects of behavioral state, memory, and others, we studied the anesthetized mouse OFC responses to auditory, visual, and audiovisual/multisensory stimuli, multisensory associations and sensory-driven input organization to the OFC. Almost all, OFC single neurons were found to be multisensory in nature, with sublinear to supralinear integration of the component unisensory stimuli. With a novel multisensory oddball stimulus set, we show that the OFC receives both unisensory as well as multisensory inputs, further corroborated by retrograde tracers showing labeling in secondary auditory and visual cortices, which we find to also have similar multisensory integration and responses. With long audiovisual pairing/association, we show rapid plasticity in OFC single neurons, with a strong visual bias, leading to a strong depression of auditory responses and effective enhancement of visual responses. Such rapid multisensory association driven plasticity is absent in the auditory and visual cortices, suggesting its emergence in the OFC. Based on the above results, we propose a hypothetical local circuit model in the OFC that integrates auditory and visual information which participates in computing stimulus value in dynamic multisensory environments.