Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, 63130, USA.
Nat Commun. 2023 Aug 5;14(1):4719. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-40443-2.
Sensory stimuli evoke spiking neural responses that innately or after learning drive suitable behavioral outputs. How are these spiking activities intrinsically patterned to encode for innate preferences, and could the neural response organization impose constraints on learning? We examined this issue in the locust olfactory system. Using a diverse odor panel, we found that ensemble activities both during ('ON response') and after stimulus presentations ('OFF response') could be linearly mapped onto overall appetitive preference indices. Although diverse, ON and OFF response patterns generated by innately appetitive odorants (higher palp-opening responses) were still limited to a low-dimensional subspace (a 'neural manifold'). Similarly, innately non-appetitive odorants evoked responses that were separable yet confined to another neural manifold. Notably, only odorants that evoked neural response excursions in the appetitive manifold could be associated with gustatory reward. In sum, these results provide insights into how encoding for innate preferences can also impact associative learning.
感觉刺激会引发尖峰神经反应，这些反应天生或经过学习后会驱动合适的行为输出。这些尖峰活动是如何内在地形成以编码天生的偏好的，神经反应的组织是否会对学习施加限制？我们在蝗虫嗅觉系统中研究了这个问题。使用一个多样化的气味面板，我们发现，在刺激呈现期间（“ON 反应”）和之后（“OFF 反应”）的集合活动都可以被线性映射到整体的喜好偏好指数上。尽管多种多样，但天生有吸引力的气味（更高的拍打开口反应）产生的 ON 和 OFF 反应模式仍然局限于一个低维子空间（“神经流形”）。同样，天生没有吸引力的气味会引起可分离但局限于另一个神经流形的反应。值得注意的是，只有那些在有吸引力的流形中引起神经反应波动的气味才能与味觉奖励相关联。总之，这些结果提供了一些关于如何编码天生偏好也会影响联想学习的见解。
