Institute of Neuroscience, State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2021 Aug;24(8):1110-1120. doi: 10.1038/s41593-021-00865-x. Epub 2021 Jun 3.
Context-based sensorimotor routing is a hallmark of executive control. Pharmacological inactivations in rats have implicated the midbrain superior colliculus (SC) in this process. But what specific role is this, and what circuit mechanisms support it? Here we report a subset of rat SC neurons that instantiate a specific link between the representations of context and motor choice. Moreover, these neurons encode animals' choice far earlier than other neurons in the SC or in the frontal cortex, suggesting that their neural dynamics lead choice computation. Optogenetic inactivations revealed that SC activity during context encoding is necessary for choice behavior, even while that choice behavior is robust to inactivations during choice formation. Searches for SC circuit models matching our experimental results identified key circuit predictions while revealing some a priori expected features as unnecessary. Our results reveal circuit mechanisms within the SC that implement response inhibition and context-based vector inversion during executive control.
基于情境的感觉运动路由是执行控制的标志。对大鼠的药理学失活研究表明，中脑上丘（SC）在这个过程中起作用。但是，它的具体作用是什么，支持它的电路机制又是什么？在这里，我们报告了大鼠 SC 神经元的一个子集，它们体现了情境表示和运动选择之间的特定联系。此外，这些神经元比 SC 或前额皮质中的其他神经元更早地编码动物的选择，这表明它们的神经动力学导致了选择计算。光遗传学失活揭示了 SC 在上下文编码期间的活动对于选择行为是必要的，即使在选择形成期间对失活具有很强的鲁棒性。与我们的实验结果匹配的 SC 电路模型搜索确定了关键的电路预测，同时揭示了一些先前预期的特征是不必要的。我们的研究结果揭示了 SC 内的电路机制，这些机制在执行控制期间实现了反应抑制和基于情境的向量反转。
