Center for Brain and Cognition and Department of Information and Communications Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona 08018, Spain.
Research Unit, Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu, Esplugues de Llobregat, Barcelona 08950, Spain.
Nat Commun. 2017 Mar 24;8:14823. doi: 10.1038/ncomms14823.
Adaptive behavior requires integrating prior with current information to anticipate upcoming events. Brain structures related to this computation should bring relevant signals from the recent past into the present. Here we report that rats can integrate the most recent prior information with sensory information, thereby improving behavior on a perceptual decision-making task with outcome-dependent past trial history. We find that anticipatory signals in the orbitofrontal cortex about upcoming choice increase over time and are even present before stimulus onset. These neuronal signals also represent the stimulus and relevant second-order combinations of past state variables. The encoding of choice, stimulus and second-order past state variables resides, up to movement onset, in overlapping populations. The neuronal representation of choice before stimulus onset and its build-up once the stimulus is presented suggest that orbitofrontal cortex plays a role in transforming immediate prior and stimulus information into choices using a compact state-space representation.
适应性行为需要将过去的信息与当前的信息相结合，以预测即将发生的事件。与这种计算相关的大脑结构应该将来自最近过去的相关信号带入现在。在这里，我们报告说，老鼠可以将最近的先验信息与感觉信息结合起来，从而在具有依结果而定的过去试验历史的感知决策任务中提高行为表现。我们发现，眶额皮层中关于即将到来的选择的预期信号随着时间的推移而增加，甚至在刺激出现之前就已经存在。这些神经元信号也代表了刺激和过去状态变量的相关二阶组合。在运动开始之前，选择、刺激和二阶过去状态变量的编码都驻留在重叠的群体中。在刺激出现之前对选择的神经元表示及其在刺激出现后的建立表明，眶额皮层在使用紧凑的状态空间表示将即时的先验和刺激信息转换为选择方面发挥作用。
