Department of Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA.
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA.
Nat Commun. 2022 Jun 25;13(1):3638. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-31440-y.
Acquisition of new skills has the potential to disturb existing network function. To directly assess whether previously acquired cortical function is altered during learning, mice were trained in an abstract task in which selected activity patterns were rewarded using an optical brain-computer interface device coupled to primary visual cortex (V1) neurons. Excitatory neurons were longitudinally recorded using 2-photon calcium imaging. Despite significant changes in local neural activity during task performance, tuning properties and stimulus encoding assessed outside of the trained context were not perturbed. Similarly, stimulus tuning was stable in neurons that remained responsive following a different, visual discrimination training task. However, visual discrimination training increased the rate of representational drift. Our results indicate that while some forms of perceptual learning may modify the contribution of individual neurons to stimulus encoding, new skill learning is not inherently disruptive to the quality of stimulus representation in adult V1.
习得新技能可能会扰乱现有的网络功能。为了直接评估在学习过程中先前获得的皮质功能是否发生改变，研究人员在一个抽象任务中对小鼠进行了训练，该任务使用与初级视觉皮层（V1）神经元相连的光脑机接口设备来奖励选定的活动模式。通过双光子钙成像对兴奋性神经元进行了纵向记录。尽管在任务执行过程中局部神经活动发生了显著变化，但在训练环境之外评估的调谐特性和刺激编码并没有受到干扰。同样，在经历了不同的视觉辨别训练任务后仍然有反应的神经元中，刺激调谐也是稳定的。然而，视觉辨别训练增加了表示漂移的速度。我们的研究结果表明，虽然某些形式的知觉学习可能会改变单个神经元对刺激编码的贡献，但新技能的学习并不会对成年 V1 中刺激表示的质量产生固有干扰。
