Figure 2

Stimuli of different taste qualities produce unique patterns of relative firing among central gustatory neurons during the first second of stimulus processing. Here, spiking rates to oral stimulation with sucrose (a prototypical "sweet" stimulus), NaCl ("salty"), HCl ("sour") or quinine ("bitter") were compared between taste neurons recorded from the rat NST using a theoretic technique based on statistical decision theory. This model bears on whether different cells fire at similar or reliably different spike rates when under the drive of a particular stimulus. The outcome of this analysis as applied to all possible neuron pairs among six randomly-selected cells is represented graphically as a set of half-matrices. A blackened matrix element represents that the i^th neuron (denoted along the matrix columns) of a particular pair fired at a detectably faster rate than the j^th (rows). A non-shaded element denotes similar spike rates (not different) between neurons, whereas halftone shading indicates that the j^th fired detectably faster than the i^th. It can be seen that different stimuli produce unique relative response relationships among these cells. A downstream processor of these neurons with knowledge of the stimulus associated with each response relationship could, in principle, compute discriminations among these stimuli. Reprinted from [40], with permission of the Journal of Neuroscience.