Department of Behavior and Brain Organization, Center Advanced European Study and Research (Caesar), Bonn 53175, Germany.
Department of Neurobiology, Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Sciences (Medicine), Hiroshima University, Hiroshima 734-8553, Japan.
Cereb Cortex. 2021 Jul 29;31(9):4357-4375. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab091.
The frontal cortex-basal ganglia network plays a pivotal role in adaptive goal-directed behaviors. Medial frontal cortex (MFC) encodes information about choices and outcomes into sequential activation of neural population, or neural trajectory. While MFC projects to the dorsal striatum (DS), whether DS also displays temporally coordinated activity remains unknown. We studied this question by simultaneously recording neural ensembles in the MFC and DS of rodents performing an outcome-based alternative choice task. We found that the two regions exhibited highly parallel evolution of neural trajectories, transforming choice information into outcome-related information. When the two trajectories were highly correlated, spike synchrony was task-dependently modulated in some MFC-DS neuron pairs. Our results suggest that neural trajectories concomitantly process decision-relevant information in MFC and DS with increased spike synchrony between these regions.
额皮质-基底神经节网络在适应性目标导向行为中起着关键作用。内侧前额叶皮层（MFC）将有关选择和结果的信息编码为神经群体或神经轨迹的顺序激活。虽然 MFC 投射到背侧纹状体（DS），但 DS 是否也显示出时间协调的活动尚不清楚。我们通过同时记录啮齿动物在基于结果的替代选择任务中执行任务时 MFC 和 DS 中的神经集合来研究这个问题。我们发现，这两个区域的神经轨迹高度平行进化，将选择信息转化为与结果相关的信息。当两条轨迹高度相关时，在一些 MFC-DS 神经元对中，尖峰同步被任务依赖性地调制。我们的结果表明，神经轨迹同时在 MFC 和 DS 中处理与决策相关的信息，这些区域之间的尖峰同步增加。
