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Information for decision-making and stimulus identification is multiplexed in sensory cortex

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Abstract

In recordings from anterior piriform cortex in awake behaving mice, we found that neuronal firing early in the olfactory pathway simultaneously conveyed fundamentally different information: odor value (is the odor rewarded?) and identity (what is the smell?). Thus, this sensory system performs early multiplexing of information reflecting stimulus-specific characteristics with that used for decision-making.

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Figure 1: Odor-induced changes in the firing rates of neurons in APC when neuronal firing is not locked to sniffs (sniff onset after odor addition differs from trial to trial).
Figure 2: Examples showing odor-induced firing in a sniff.
Figure 3: Summary of sniff-locked odor responses.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. Felsen and N. Schoppa for discussions. This work was funded by grants from the US National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (F32 DC011980 to D.H.G., F31 DC011202 to J.D.W., F30 DC008066 to W.D., R01 DC00566 to D.R. and P30 DC04657 to D.R.).

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Author notes

  1. David H Gire and Jennifer D Whitesell: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado Medical School, Aurora, Colorado, USA

    David H Gire, Wilder Doucette & Diego Restrepo

  2. Neuroscience Program, University of Colorado Medical School, Aurora, Colorado, USA

    David H Gire, Jennifer D Whitesell, Wilder Doucette & Diego Restrepo

  3. Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Colorado Medical School, Aurora, Colorado, USA

    Jennifer D Whitesell

Authors
  1. David H Gire
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  2. Jennifer D Whitesell
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  3. Wilder Doucette
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  4. Diego Restrepo
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Contributions

J.D.W. and D.R. formulated the experimental paradigm and designed all the experiments. J.D.W. performed all the experiments and extracted single and multi-units from the raw data. D.H.G. and D.R. performed analysis of the data and generated all the figures. W.D. and D.R. set up the awake behaving recording system and D.R. wrote all programs necessary to run the experiments. W.D. trained J.D.W. on how to perform surgeries and run the experiments with awake behaving mice. All authors had the opportunity to discuss the results, participated in writing and made comments on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diego Restrepo.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Gire, D., Whitesell, J., Doucette, W. et al. Information for decision-making and stimulus identification is multiplexed in sensory cortex. Nat Neurosci 16, 991–993 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3432

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