Bidirectional plasticity of cortical pattern recognition and behavioral sensory acuity
Open Access
- 20 November 2011
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Neuroscience
- Vol. 15 (1), 155-161
- https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2966
Abstract
The authors show that rats trained with overlapping complex odorant mixtures have improved behavioral discrimination ability and enhanced cortical ensemble pattern separation. Training to disregard normally detectable differences between overlapping mixtures impairs cortical pattern separation and behavioral discrimination. These results show that the balance between pattern separation and completion is experience dependent. Learning to adapt to a complex and fluctuating environment requires the ability to adjust neural representations of sensory stimuli. Through pattern completion processes, cortical networks can reconstruct familiar patterns from degraded input patterns, whereas pattern separation processes allow discrimination of even highly overlapping inputs. Here we show that the balance between pattern separation and completion is experience dependent. Rats given extensive training with overlapping complex odorant mixtures showed improved behavioral discrimination ability and enhanced piriform cortical ensemble pattern separation. In contrast, behavioral training to disregard normally detectable differences between overlapping mixtures resulted in impaired piriform cortical ensemble pattern separation (enhanced pattern completion) and impaired discrimination. This bidirectional effect was not found in the olfactory bulb; it may be due to plasticity within olfactory cortex itself. Thus pattern recognition, and the balance between pattern separation and completion, is highly malleable on the basis of task demands and occurs in concert with changes in perceptual performance.Keywords
This publication has 49 references indexed in Scilit:
- Associative Cortex Features in the First Olfactory Brain Relay StationNeuron, 2011
- Neural correlates of olfactory learning: Critical role of centrifugal neuromodulationLearning & Memory, 2010
- Disruption of odour quality coding in piriform cortex mediates olfactory deficits in Alzheimer's diseaseBrain, 2010
- From Dendrite to Soma: Dynamic Routing of Inhibition by Complementary Interneuron Microcircuits in Olfactory CortexNeuron, 2010
- From the top down: flexible reading of a fragmented odor mapTrends in Neurosciences, 2009
- Olfactory oscillations: the what, how and what forTrends in Neurosciences, 2009
- Olfactory perceptual stability and discriminationNature Neuroscience, 2008
- Sniffing Behavior of Mice during Performance in Odor-Guided TasksChemical Senses, 2008
- Separate encoding of identity and similarity of complex familiar odors in piriform cortexProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006
- Changes in Spatial Patterns of Rabbit Olfactory EEG with Conditioning to OdorsPsychophysiology, 1982