Wang Qingjun, Shi Binchao, Jia Jing, Hu Jingyu, Li Haoran, Jin Xin, Chen Aihua
Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China.
New Cornerstone Science Laboratory, Center for Motor Control and Disease, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China.
iScience. 2024 Dec 26;28(1):111694. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.111694. eCollection 2025 Jan 17.
Learned action sequences are suggested to be organized hierarchically, but how the various hierarchical levels are processed by different cortical regions remains largely unknown. By training monkeys to perform heterogeneous saccade sequences, we investigated the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) in sequence planning and execution. The electrophysiological recording revealed that sequence-level initiation information was mostly signaled by DLPFC neurons, whereas subsequence-level transition was largely encoded by LIP neurons. Although electrical microstimulation on DLPFC weakly affected sequence performance, inactivating DLPFC significantly increased the initiation latency of the entire sequences, indicating that DLPFC was involved in the sequence initiation. In contrast, either microstimulation or inactivation of area LIP caused improper switches between subsequences, suggesting that LIP played a role in subsequence switch. Overall, these results demonstrated that frontal and parietal cortices play distinct yet complementary roles in controlling learned saccade sequences.
习得的动作序列被认为是分层组织的，但不同皮层区域如何处理不同的层次水平在很大程度上仍然未知。通过训练猴子执行异质扫视序列，我们研究了背外侧前额叶皮层（DLPFC）和顶内叶外侧皮层（LIP）在序列规划和执行中的作用。电生理记录显示，序列水平的启动信息主要由DLPFC神经元发出信号，而子序列水平的转换主要由LIP神经元编码。虽然对DLPFC的电微刺激对序列表现的影响较弱，但使DLPFC失活显著增加了整个序列的启动潜伏期，表明DLPFC参与了序列启动。相比之下，对LIP区域的微刺激或失活都会导致子序列之间的不适当切换，这表明LIP在子序列切换中发挥了作用。总体而言，这些结果表明额叶和顶叶皮层在控制习得的扫视序列中发挥着不同但互补的作用。
