Tuning of ventral tenia tecta neurons of the olfactory cortex to distinct scenes of feeding behavior

Ventral tenia tecta (vTT) is a part of the olfactory cortex that receives both olfactory sensory signals from the olfactory bulb and top-down signals from the prefrontal cortex. To address the question whether and how the neuronal activity of the vTT is modulated by prefrontal cognitive processes such as attention, expectation and working memory that occurs during goal-directed behaviors, we recorded individual neuronal responses in the vTT of freely moving awake mice that performed learned odor-guided feeding and drinking behaviors. We found that the firing pattern of individual vTT cells had repeatable behavioral correlates such that the environmental and behavioral scene the mouse encountered during the learned behavior was the major determinant of when individual vTT neurons fired maximally. Furthermore, spiking activity of these scene cells was modulated not only by the present scene but also by the future scene that the mouse predicted. We show that vTT receives afferent input from the olfactory bulb and top-down inputs from the medial prefrontal cortex and piriform cortex.These results indicate that different groups of vTT cells are activated at different scenes and suggest that processing of olfactory sensory information is handled by different scene cells during distinct scenes of learned feeding and drinking behaviors. In other words, during the feeding and drinking behavior, vTT changes its working mode moment by moment in accord with the scene change by selectively biasing specific scene cells. The scene effect on olfactory sensory processing in the vTT has implications for the neuronal circuit mechanisms of top-down attention and scene-dependent encoding and recall of olfactory memory.