Cortical population coding of consumption decisions
Details on how to join the talk will be released via our mailing list (info on how to subscribe on https://cortexclub.com). After the talk, at 5.15 pm, students and postdocs are welcome to join for a virtual "pub chat" with Prof. Don Katz.
The moment that a tasty substance enters an animal’s mouth, the clock starts ticking. Taste information transduced on the tongue signals whether a potential food will nourish or poison, and the animal must therefore use this information quickly if it is to decide whether the food should be swallowed or expelled. The system tasked with computing this important decision is rife with cross-talk and feedback—circuitry that all but ensures dynamics and between-neuron coupling in neural responses to tastes. In fact, cortical taste responses, rather than simply reporting individual taste identities, do contain characterizable dynamics: taste-driven firing first reflects the substance’s presence on the tongue, and then broadly codes taste quality, and then shifts again to correlate with the taste’s current palatability—the basis of consumption decisions—all across the 1-1.5 seconds after taste administration. Ensemble analyses reveal the onset of palatability-related firing to be a sudden, nonlinear transition happening in many neurons simultaneously, such that it can be reliably detected in single trials. This transition faithfully predicts both the nature and timing of consumption behaviors, despite the huge trial-to-trial variability in both; furthermore, perturbations of this transition interfere with production of the behaviors. These results demonstrate the specific importance of ensemble dynamics in the generation of behavior, and reveal the taste system to be akin to a range of other integrated sensorimotor systems.
Date: 30 June 2020, 16:00 (Tuesday, 10th week, Trinity 2020)
Venue: Online talk - Details on how to join the talk and the virtual "pub chat" will be released via our mailing list (info on how to subscribe on https://cortexclub.com)
Speaker: Prof. Donald B. Katz (Brandeis University)
Organiser: Cortex Club (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: cortex.club@studentclubs.ox.ac.uk
Host: Jasper E. Hunt (University of Oxford)
Part of: Cortex Club - Oxford Neuroscience Society
Topics:
Booking required?: Not required
Booking url: https://cortexclub.com/
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Raffaele Sarnataro, Jasper Hunt