title: Associative learning changes cross-modal representations in the gustatory cortex.
abstract: A growing body of literature has demonstrated that primary sensory cortices are not exclusively unimodal, but can respond to stimuli of different sensory modalities. However, several questions concerning the neural representation of cross-modal stimuli remain open. Indeed, it is poorly understood if cross-modal stimuli evoke unique or overlapping representations in a primary sensory cortex and whether learning can modulate these representations. Here we recorded single unit responses to auditory, visual, somatosensory, and olfactory stimuli in the gustatory cortex (GC) of alert rats before and after associative learning. We found that, in untrained rats, the majority of GC neurons were modulated by a single modality. Upon learning, both prevalence of cross-modal responsive neurons and their breadth of tuning increased, leading to a greater overlap of representations. Altogether, our results show that the gustatory cortex represents cross-modal stimuli according to their sensory identity, and that learning changes the overlap of cross-modal representations.
authors: Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, United States.
authors: Roberto
authors: 0000-0002-5812-7624
authors: R
authors: Vincis
authors: Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, United States.
authors: Alfredo
authors: 0000-0003-4561-9563
authors: A
authors: Fontanini
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D007858:Learning; D051381:Rats; D013003:Somatosensory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D055697:Taste Perception
keywords: behavior; electrophysiology; expectation; gustatory cortex; learning; multimodal; neuroscience; rat