Biology subjects

Staszko, S. M.

Publications and source records attributed to Staszko, S. M..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

An adaptive noradrenergic-prefrontal circuit for innate avoidance of heights

Innate preferences determine how animals interact with the environment, but how experience refines the neural processes underlying those intrinsic motivations is not well understood. Here we develop a virtual pole descent task which permitted in which mice can repeat many trials without habituation of height-dependent avoidance. Mice adjusted their choices based on recent trial outcomes without externally imposed behavioral reinforcement or punishment. Using this paradigm, we found that noradrenergic signaling enhances height avoidance while experience refines the prefrontal cortex population representation of the task. Inhibiting locus coeruleus norepinephrine neurons reduced safe choices in apparently tall visual height stimuli, while stimulating their projections to prelimbic cortex enhanced safe decision-making. Anticipatory norepinephrine in prelimbic cortex correlated with height avoidance across animals and reflected trial outcome history. Miniscope calcium imaging revealed prelimbic neurons tracked progress in the task. At the population level, experience induced improvements in the decoding of position which correlated strongly with behavioral improvements. With experience, neural trajectories became less variable during the task and reliability of representations correlated with behavioral improvement. Together these results reveal that innate threat experience can induce prefrontal cortical refinement without externally imposed reinforcement. Innate behavioral preference is thus maintained while the neural processes underlying it evolve, suggesting flexibility in neural circuits for interacting with hardwired environmental motivations.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Neural coding in gustatory cortex reflects consumption decisions: Evidence from conditioned taste aversion

Taste-responsive neurons in the gustatory cortex (GC) have been shown to encode multiple properties of stimuli, including whether they are palatable or not. Previous studies have suggested that a form of taste-involved learning, conditioned taste aversion (CTA), may alter the cortical representation of taste stimuli in a number of ways. We used miniscopes to image taste responses from a large population of neurons in the gustatory cortex of mice before and after CTA to NaCl, comparing taste responses in control and conditioned mice. Following conditioning, no significant effects on the number of responsive cells, or the magnitude of response to either NaCl or other taste stimuli were found. However, population-level analyses showed that in mice receiving a CTA, the representation of NaCl diverged from other appetitive stimuli in neural space and moved closer to that of aversive quinine. We also tracked extinction of the CTA in a subset of animals and showed that as NaCl became less aversive, the neural pattern reverted to match the behavior. These data suggest that the predominant function of the taste representation in GC is palatability; the neuronal response pattern to stimuli at the population level reflects the decision of the animal to consume or not consume the stimulus, regardless of quality or chemical identity.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Frontal cortex norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine dynamics in an innate fear-reward behavioral model

Animals must survive by foraging for food in an uncertain and dangerous world. Neural circuits for naturalistic decision-making under these conditions must balance competing motivational demands for approaching reward and avoiding danger. To enable flexible switching between motivational states, neuromodulators are released and alter neural excitability and plasticity. The question of how neuromodulators encode motivational state is thus fundamental to systems neuroscience, yet the dynamics of neuromodulators during naturalistic decision making are not fully understood. Here, we developed a naturalistic approach/avoidance task in mice involving a tradeoff between seeking reward versus safety in the presence of looming predation risk. We utilized fiber photometry, computational behavior tracking, and local pharmacology in this task. Silencing medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) reduced looming defensive behaviors. Moreover, by using fiber photometry combined with GPCR-based sensors, we found that cortical norepinephrine (NE) plays a more prominent role in encoding looming threats while dopamine (DA) represents reward and threat. In contrast, serotonin (5HT) dynamic negatively correlates to both emotional valences. To begin to understand neuromodulatory interactions, we used ex vivo slice physiology to understand 5HT impact on spontaneous firing of locus coeruleus NE neurons. In conclusion, monoamines such as NE, DA, 5HT can converge in their encoding of naturalistic motivated behaviors as well as dissociate from one another. By utilizing this novel innate reward-threat task, we can better understand neurochemical signaling events during natural behavior, and may contribute to the understanding of neural mechanisms underlying emotional decision-making and its implications for psychiatric disorders.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

The impact of familiarity on cortical taste coding

The role of the gustatory region of the insular cortex in mediating associative taste learning, such as conditioned taste aversion, has been well studied. However, while associative learning plays a role in some taste behaviors, such as avoidance of toxins, taste stimuli are often encountered by animals in their natural environment without explicit consequences. This type of inconsequential experience with sensory stimuli has been studied in other sensory systems, generally with the finding that neuronal responses habituate with repeated sensory exposure. The present study sought to determine the effect of taste familiarity on population taste coding in mouse gustatory cortex (GC). Using microendoscope calcium imaging, we studied the taste responses of visually identifiable neurons over five days of taste experience, during which animals could freely choose to consume taste stimuli. We found that the number of active cells in insular cortex, as well as the number of cells characterized as taste-responsive, significantly decreased as animals became familiar with taste stimuli. Moreover, the magnitude of taste-evoked excited responses increased, and inhibited responses decreased with experience. By tracking individual neurons over time, we focused on taste coding in a subpopulation of "stable" neurons that were present on all days of the taste familiarity paradigm. The population-level response across these stable cells was distinct when taste stimuli were novel but became more intercorrelated among those taste stimuli mice willingly consumed as the stimuli became familiar. Overall, these results highlight the effects of familiarity on taste responses in gustatory cortex.

neuroscience↗