Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA.
Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2021 Jun;24(6):843-850. doi: 10.1038/s41593-021-00840-6. Epub 2021 Apr 19.
Decisions are held in memory until enacted, which makes them potentially vulnerable to distracting sensory input. Gating of information flow from sensory to motor areas could protect memory from interference during decision-making, but the underlying network mechanisms are not understood. Here, we trained mice to detect optogenetic stimulation of the somatosensory cortex, with a delay separating sensation and action. During the delay, distracting stimuli lost influence on behavior over time, even though distractor-evoked neural activity percolated through the cortex without attenuation. Instead, choice-encoding activity in the motor cortex became progressively less sensitive to the impact of distractors. Reverse engineering of neural networks trained to reproduce motor cortex activity revealed that the reduction in sensitivity to distractors was caused by a growing separation in the neural activity space between attractors that encode alternative decisions. Our results show that communication between brain regions can be gated via attractor dynamics, which control the degree of commitment to an action.
决策在被执行之前一直存储在记忆中，这使得它们容易受到分散注意力的感官输入的影响。信息从感觉区到运动区的门控可以在决策过程中保护记忆免受干扰，但基础的网络机制尚不清楚。在这里，我们训练老鼠来检测感觉皮层的光遗传学刺激，感觉和动作之间有延迟。在延迟期间，随着时间的推移，分心刺激对行为的影响逐渐减弱，尽管分心诱发的神经活动在皮层中没有衰减地传播。相反，运动皮层中的选择编码活动对干扰物的影响变得越来越不敏感。为了重现运动皮层活动而训练的神经网络的反向工程表明，对干扰物的敏感性降低是由于吸引子之间的神经活动空间的分离程度增加，吸引子编码替代决策。我们的结果表明，通过吸引子动力学可以对大脑区域之间的通信进行门控，吸引子动力学控制着对动作的承诺程度。
