1] Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. [2] Brain Sciences Center, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. [3] Department of Biology, Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2013 Oct;16(10):1484-91. doi: 10.1038/nn.3509. Epub 2013 Sep 1.
Prefrontal cortex influences behavior largely through its connections with other association cortices; however, the nature of the information conveyed by prefrontal output signals and what effect these signals have on computations performed by target structures is largely unknown. To address these questions, we simultaneously recorded the activity of neurons in prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices of monkeys performing a rule-based spatial categorization task. Parietal cortex receives direct prefrontal input, and parietal neurons, like their prefrontal counterparts, exhibit signals that reflect rule-based cognitive processing in this task. By analyzing rapid fluctuations in the cognitive information encoded by activity in the two areas, we obtained evidence that signals reflecting rule-dependent categories were selectively transmitted in a top-down direction from prefrontal to parietal neurons, suggesting that prefrontal output is important for the executive control of distributed cognitive processing.
前额皮质主要通过与其他联合皮质的连接来影响行为；然而，前额皮质输出信号所传递的信息的性质以及这些信号对目标结构所执行的计算有什么影响，在很大程度上是未知的。为了解决这些问题，我们在猴子执行基于规则的空间分类任务时，同时记录了前额皮质和顶后皮质神经元的活动。顶叶皮质接收来自前额皮质的直接输入，并且顶叶神经元与它们的前额皮质对应物一样，表现出反映该任务中基于规则的认知处理的信号。通过分析两个区域活动中编码的认知信息的快速波动，我们获得了证据表明，反映基于规则的类别的信号选择性地从前额皮质向下传递到顶叶神经元，这表明前额皮质的输出对于分布式认知处理的执行控制很重要。
