International Research Centre for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, Tokyo, Japan.
RIKEN Centre for Brain Science, Saitama, Japan.
Elife. 2021 Oct 29;10:e69079. doi: 10.7554/eLife.69079.
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is thought to orchestrate cognitive dynamics. However, in tests of bistable visual perception, no direct evidence supporting such presumable causal roles of the PFC has been reported except for a recent work. Here, using a novel brain-state-dependent neural stimulation system, we identified causal effects on percept dynamics in three PFC activities-right frontal eye fields, dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC), and inferior frontal cortex (IFC). The causality is behaviourally detectable only when we track brain state dynamics and modulate the PFC activity in brain-state-/state-history-dependent manners. The behavioural effects are underpinned by transient neural changes in the brain state dynamics, and such neural effects are quantitatively explainable by structural transformations of the hypothetical energy landscapes. Moreover, these findings indicate distinct functions of the three PFC areas: in particular, the DLPFC enhances the integration of two PFC-active brain states, whereas IFC promotes the functional segregation between them. This work resolves the controversy over the PFC roles in spontaneous perceptual switching and underlines brain state dynamics in fine investigations of brain-behaviour causality.
前额叶皮层（PFC）被认为协调认知动态。然而，在双稳态视觉感知测试中，除了最近的一项工作外，没有报告任何支持 PFC 这种假定因果作用的直接证据。在这里，我们使用一种新的基于脑状态的神经刺激系统，在三个 PFC 活动（右侧额眼区、背外侧前额叶皮层（DLPFC）和下额叶皮层（IFC））中确定了对感知动态的因果影响。只有当我们跟踪脑状态动态并以脑状态/状态历史依赖的方式调节 PFC 活动时，才能在行为上检测到这种因果关系。行为效应是由脑状态动态中的瞬时神经变化支持的，而这种神经效应可以通过假设的能量景观的结构变换来定量解释。此外，这些发现表明了三个 PFC 区域的不同功能：特别是，DLPFC 增强了两个 PFC 活跃的脑状态之间的整合，而 IFC 促进了它们之间的功能分离。这项工作解决了 PFC 在自发感知转换中的作用的争议，并强调了脑状态动态在脑-行为因果关系的精细研究中的重要性。
