Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA.
Sci Rep. 2013;3:2285. doi: 10.1038/srep02285.
During the perception-to-action cycle, our cerebral cortex mediates the interactions between the environment and the perceptual-executive systems of the brain. At the top of the executive hierarchy, prefrontal cortical microcircuits are assumed to bind perceptual and executive control information to guide goal-driven behavior. Here, we tested this hypothesis by comparing simultaneously recorded neuron firing in prefrontal cortical layers and the caudate-putamen of rhesus monkeys, trained in a spatial-versus-object, rule-based match-to-sample task. We found that during the perception and executive selection phases, cell firing in the localized prefrontal layers and caudate-putamen region exhibited similar location preferences on spatial-trials, but less on object- trials. Then, we facilitated the perceptual-executive circuit by stimulating the prefrontal infra-granular-layers with patterns previously derived from supra-granular-layers, and produced stimulation-induced spatial preference in percent correct performance on spatial trials, similar to neural tuning. These results show that inter-laminar prefrontal microcircuits play causal roles to the perception-to-action cycle.
在感知到行动的循环中，我们的大脑皮层介导了环境与大脑的感知-执行系统之间的相互作用。在执行层次结构的顶端，前额皮质微电路被认为将感知和执行控制信息结合起来，以指导目标驱动的行为。在这里，我们通过比较同时记录猕猴前额皮质层和尾状核的神经元放电，在基于空间与对象的基于规则的匹配样本任务中进行了测试。我们发现，在感知和执行选择阶段，局部前额皮质层和尾状核区域的细胞在空间试验上表现出相似的位置偏好，但在对象试验上则较少。然后，我们通过用从前额皮质上层导出的模式刺激下颗粒层来促进感知-执行回路，从而在空间试验上的正确性能百分比中产生刺激诱导的空间偏好，类似于神经调整。这些结果表明，层间前额皮质微电路对感知到行动的循环起着因果作用。
