School of Physiology, Pharmacology & Neuroscience, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TD, UK; The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Rd, London, UK; The Francis Crick Institute, 1 Midland Road, London, UK.
School of Physiology, Pharmacology & Neuroscience, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TD, UK; BioTechMed Center, Brain & Mind Electrophysiology Laboratory, Multimedia Systems Department, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdansk University of Technology, 80-233 Gdansk, Poland.
Curr Biol. 2023 Apr 10;33(7):1220-1236.e4. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.029. Epub 2023 Mar 9.
Short-term memory enables incorporation of recent experience into subsequent decision-making. This processing recruits both the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, where neurons encode task cues, rules, and outcomes. However, precisely which information is carried when, and by which neurons, remains unclear. Using population decoding of activity in rat medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and dorsal hippocampal CA1, we confirm that mPFC populations lead in maintaining sample information across delays of an operant non-match to sample task, despite individual neurons firing only transiently. During sample encoding, distinct mPFC subpopulations joined distributed CA1-mPFC cell assemblies hallmarked by 4-5 Hz rhythmic modulation; CA1-mPFC assemblies re-emerged during choice episodes but were not 4-5 Hz modulated. Delay-dependent errors arose when attenuated rhythmic assembly activity heralded collapse of sustained mPFC encoding. Our results map component processes of memory-guided decisions onto heterogeneous CA1-mPFC subpopulations and the dynamics of physiologically distinct, distributed cell assemblies.
短期记忆使人们能够将最近的经验融入后续的决策中。这个过程需要前额叶皮层和海马体的参与，神经元在这些区域中对任务提示、规则和结果进行编码。然而，目前尚不清楚哪些信息是在什么时候以及由哪些神经元携带的。通过对大鼠内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）和背侧海马 CA1 区的群体活动进行解码，我们证实尽管单个神经元的放电是短暂的，但 mPFC 群体在操作非匹配样本任务的延迟过程中仍能保持样本信息。在样本编码期间，不同的 mPFC 亚群加入了由 4-5 Hz 节律调制标记的分布式 CA1-mPFC 细胞集合；在选择期间，CA1-mPFC 集合重新出现，但不受 4-5 Hz 调制。当减弱的节律集合活动预示着持续的 mPFC 编码崩溃时，就会出现延迟依赖的错误。我们的研究结果将记忆引导决策的组成过程映射到异质的 CA1-mPFC 亚群以及生理上不同的分布式细胞集合的动力学上。
