%0 Journal Article %A Sudha Sharma %A Sharba Bandyopadhyay %T Differential rapid plasticity in auditory and visual responses in the primarily multisensory orbitofrontal cortex %D 2020 %R 10.1523/ENEURO.0061-20.2020 %J eneuro %P ENEURO.0061-20.2020 %X Given the connectivity of Orbitofrontal Cortex(OFC) with the sensory areas and areas involved in goal execution, it is likely that OFC, along with it’s function in reward processing, also has a role to play in perception based multisensory decision making. To understand mechanisms involved in multisensory decision making, it is important to first know the encoding of different sensory stimuli in single neurons of the mouse OFC. Ruling out effects of behavioral state, memory and others, we studied the anesthetized mouse OFC responses to auditory, visual and audiovisual/multisensory stimuli, multisensory associations and sensory-driven input organization to the OFC. Almost all, OFC single neurons were found to be multisensory in nature, with sublinear to supralinear integration of the component unisensory stimuli. With a novel multisensory oddball stimulus set, we show that the OFC receives both unisensory as well as multisensory inputs, further corroborated by retrograde tracers showing labeling in secondary auditory and visual cortices, which we find to also have similar multisensory integration and responses. With long audiovisual pairing/association, we show rapid plasticity in OFC single neurons, with a strong visual bias, leading to a strong depression of auditory responses and effective enhancement of visual responses. Such rapid multisensory association driven plasticity is absent in the auditory and visual cortices, suggesting its emergence in the OFC. Based on the above results we propose a hypothetical local circuit model in the OFC that integrates auditory and visual information which participates in computing stimulus value in dynamic multisensory environments.Significance Statement Understanding encoding of different modalities in single neurons of Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) can help decipher its role in perceptual decision making. Basic sensory response properties of mouse OFC are poorly understood. In our study mouse OFC is found to be primarily multisensory with varied nonlinear interactions, explained by parallel unisensory and multisensory inputs. Audio-visual associations cause rapid plastic changes in the OFC, which bias visual responses while suppressing auditory responses. Similar plasticity was absent in the sensory cortex. Thus the observed intrinsic visual bias in the OFC weighs visual stimuli more than associated auditory stimuli in value encoding in a dynamic multisensory environment. %U https://www.eneuro.org/content/eneuro/early/2020/05/18/ENEURO.0061-20.2020.full.pdf