Temporal progression along discrete coding states during decision-making in the mouse gustatory cortex.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Decision Neuroscience

Background:

• The mouse gustatory cortex (GC) processes taste information and guides decision-making.
• Metastable neural dynamics are observed in the GC during ongoing and stimulus-evoked activity.
• The role of GC metastability in taste-based decision-making tasks is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To extract and analyze metastable dynamics in mouse GC ensemble spiking activity during a perceptual decision-making task.
• To investigate the computational mechanisms underlying GC metastability in this task.
• To establish a relationship between GC neural dynamics and behavioral performance.

Main Methods:

• Analytical and modeling approaches were used to analyze neural activity.
• Ensemble spiking activity was recorded from the GC of mice performing a taste-based decision-making task.
• Computational models were perturbed to study the impact of metastability on network performance.

Main Results:

• GC activity during perceptual decision-making exhibits metastability.
• This metastability appears to sequentially encode sensory, abstract cue, and decision information over time.
• Perturbing the model's metastable dynamics revealed differential impacts of inhibition on network performance, explaining optogenetic findings.

Conclusions:

• Neural activity in the mouse gustatory cortex is metastable during taste-based decision-making.
• Metastability in the GC may serve as a neural substrate for sequential information encoding crucial for decision-making.
• Modulating inhibition within specific coding epochs of the GC's metastable dynamics can influence behavioral outcomes.