Figure 3.

Learning-induced sensory plasticity in the somatosensory and gustatory systems. Whisker-shock fear conditioning reduces the number of individual neurons in the barrel cortex that respond to the shock-predictive whisker movement compared with unpaired controls (A,B), but induces a substantial increase in the size of the whisker-evoked responses in the neurons that do respond (C). (A–C are adapted from Gdalyahu et al. 2012 and used with permission from Elsevier 2012.) (D) Three examples of individual neurons in the gustatory cortex (GC) whose tastant-evoked responses changed in magnitude and time course following conditioned taste aversion (CTA) learning. The tastant was presented at time zero, and the horizontal bar indicates the time period of statistically significant change. (E) Approximately 30% of recorded gustatory cortical neurons were changed by conditioned taste aversion learning, while few were changed by a control paradigm. (D,E are adapted from Grossman et al. 2008 and used with permission from the Society for Neuroscience 2008.)