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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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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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.
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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3432
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