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The Journal of Neuroscience, June 15, 2001, 21(12):4478-4489
Dynamic and Multimodal Responses of Gustatory Cortical Neurons in
Awake Rats
Donald B.
Katz1,
S.
A.
Simon1, 2, 3, and
Miguel A. L.
Nicolelis1, 3
Departments of 1 Neurobiology,
2 Anesthesiology, and 3 Biomedical Engineering,
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27710
To investigate the dynamic aspects of gustatory activity, we
recorded the responses of small ensembles of cortical neurons to
tastants administered to awake rats. Multiple trials of each tastant
were delivered during recordings made in oral somatosensory (SI) and
gustatory cortex (GC). When integrated tastant responses (firing rates
averaged across 2.5 sec) were compared with water responses, 14.4%
(13/90) of the GC neurons responded in a taste-specific manner. When
time was considered as a source of information, however, the incidence
of taste-specific firing increased: as many as 41% (37/90) of the
recorded GC neurons exhibited taste-specific patterns of response. For
17% of the neurons identified as responding with taste-specific
patterns, the stimulus that caused the most significant response was a
function of the time since stimulus delivery. That is, a single neuron
might respond most strongly to one tastant in the first 500 msec of a
response and then respond most strongly to another tastant later in the
response. Further analysis of the time courses of GC and SI
cortical neural responses revealed that modulations of GC firing rate
arose from three separable processes: early somatosensory input (less
than ~0.2 sec post-stimulus), later chemosensory input (~0.2-1
sec), and delayed somatosensory input related to orofacial responses
(more than ~1.0 sec). These data demonstrate that sensory information
is available in the time course of GC responses and suggest the
viability of views of gustatory processing that treat the temporal
structure of cortical responses as an integral part of the neural code.
Key words:
insular; taste; palatability; hedonics; multiple
electrode; coding
Copyright © 2001 Society for Neuroscience 0270-6474/01/21124478-12$05.00/0
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