Abstract
Survival is inextricably tied to consumption decisions; toxic foods can lead toillness/death, while nutrient-rich foods promote good health. Thus, it is useful to associate cues
(e.g., the color of a fruit) with a post-consumption outcome (e.g., eating green, unripe fruit made
me sick) to guide approach-avoidance decisions. While cue-driven-association research is
common, little research focuses on the decision-making which follows food-cues and leads to
food consumption/avoidance. To address this gap, we have developed a novel version of a
classic go/no-go task, wherein a rat must trigger a cue and then decide whether to retrieve a
reward. This framework allows us to probe the anticipation of food advertised by cues in a
multisensory setting designed to separate behaviors elicited by cues from those related to
consumption. The task pairs audio-visual cues with palatable (sucrose) and aversive (quinine)
taste stimuli. We tested whether rats successfully learn cue-taste associations by determining if
they differentially respond to cues corresponding to more preferred tastes. Here, we show rats
tend to approach only palatable stimuli advertised by the cue, suggesting that cue-taste
association was learned. Furthermore, the occasional responses to cues advertising aversive taste
were long-latency compared to those advertising palatable taste, suggesting uncertainty about a
cue’s meaning may elicit more careful consideration in making the decision. In the future, this
paradigm will be expanded to include electrophysiological interrogation of neural representations
of anticipation, decision, and response in GC to understand the neural underpinnings of the
differential behavior for different palatability cues.