Event Abstract Back to Event Behavioral context dependent modulation of pre-stimulus activity underlies the high quality sensory representation in rat taste cortex Takashi Yoshida1* and Donald Katz1 1 Brandeis University, Department of Psychology, United States Neurons in sensory cortex show organized activities even in the absence of sensory input, which often affect subsequent sensory responses. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that awake animal actively control the ongoing activity dependent on the context, and that the modulation of pre-stimulus activity could play a key role in adaptive sensory processing with a task demand such as a sensory discrimination. We tested this idea in the cortical taste processing in behaving rat. In primary taste cortex (also called gustatory cortex: GC), pre-taste stimulus activity is known to be modulated specifically when the animal is able to anticipate the upcoming stimuli. However, few studies have examined how the pre-stimulus activity modulation affects taste responses. The goal of this study is to examine the modulation of pre- and post-stimulus activity during a task in which taste served as a discriminative cue, and relationship between the pre- and post stimulus activity. GC local field potentials and single unit activities were recorded from freely moving rats. GC activities were compared between two different behavioral contexts within a session: taste discrimination task (Task) and passive taste administration (Passive). In Task, rats conducted a two-alternative forced choice task in which tastes solutions were used as discriminative cues and two taste solutions were mapped to each of two behavioral responses. In Passive condition, rats were presented taste solutions without any predictable cue and without any behavioral demands. In both conditions, taste solutions were delivered through cannulae implanted in the oral cavity. We found that local field potential power in beta and gamma frequency in Task decreased in both pre-and post-stimulus epochs, suggesting that GC network states were modified by the behavioral context. Consistent with the results of LFP, GC single neuron activities were modulated by the context in both pre- and post-stimulus epochs. In pre-stimulus epoch, firings of single neurons were modified dependent on their firing rates; relatively low firing neurons decreased their activities, while high firing neurons increased their activities in Task. Trial-to-trial variability, estimated by Fano factor, also decreased even prior to the stimulus in Task, whereas the variability decreased after stimulus in Passive. These changes had large impact on the subsequent taste responses; weak, low-firing taste responses were suppressed further, while strong, high-firing responses were maintained. This firing rate change resulted in the slight increase in taste selectivity in Task. Modulations of pre- and post-stimulus firings were positively correlated, and the increase in taste selectivity was mainly attributed to the neurons in which pre-stimulus firing decreased. These results suggest that control of pre-stimulus activity improve the quality of taste representation during the task condition in rat primary taste cortex. Conference: Neuroinformatics 2010 , Kobe, Japan, 30 Aug - 1 Sep, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Electrophysiology Citation: Yoshida T and Katz D (2010). Behavioral context dependent modulation of pre-stimulus activity underlies the high quality sensory representation in rat taste cortex. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Neuroinformatics 2010 . doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.13.00112 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 15 Jun 2010; Published Online: 15 Jun 2010. * Correspondence: Takashi Yoshida, Brandeis University, Department of Psychology, Waltham, United States, yoshida@brandeis.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. 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