{"title":"Pre-action Neuronal Encoding of Task Situation Uncertainty in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex of Rats.","authors":"Qiulin Hua, Yu Peng, Jianyun Zhang, Baoming Li, Jiyun Peng","doi":"10.1007/s12264-025-01463-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Humans and animals have a fundamental ability to use experiences and environmental information to organize behavior. It often happens that humans and animals make decisions and prepare actions under uncertain situations. Uncertainty would significantly affect the state of animals' minds, but may not be reflected in behavior. How to \"read animals' mind state\" under different situations is a challenge. Here, we report that neuronal activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of rats can reflect the environmental uncertainty when the task situation changes from certain to uncertain. Rats were trained to perform behavioral tasks under certain and uncertain situations. Under certain situations, rats were required to simply repeat two nose-poking actions that each triggered short auditory tone feedback (single-task situation). Whereas under the uncertain situation, the feedback could randomly be either the previous tone or a short musical rhythm. No additional action was required upon the music feedback, and the same secondary nose-poking action was required upon the tone feedback (dual-task situation); therefore, the coming task was uncertain before action initiation. We recorded single-unit activity from the mPFC when the rats were performing the tasks. We found that in the dual task, when uncertainty was introduced, many mPFC neurons were actively engaged in dealing with the uncertainty before the task initiation, suggesting that the rats could be aware of the task situation change and encode the information in the mPFC before the action of task initiation.</p>","PeriodicalId":19314,"journal":{"name":"Neuroscience bulletin","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.8000,"publicationDate":"2025-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Neuroscience bulletin","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-025-01463-8","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"NEUROSCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Humans and animals have a fundamental ability to use experiences and environmental information to organize behavior. It often happens that humans and animals make decisions and prepare actions under uncertain situations. Uncertainty would significantly affect the state of animals' minds, but may not be reflected in behavior. How to "read animals' mind state" under different situations is a challenge. Here, we report that neuronal activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of rats can reflect the environmental uncertainty when the task situation changes from certain to uncertain. Rats were trained to perform behavioral tasks under certain and uncertain situations. Under certain situations, rats were required to simply repeat two nose-poking actions that each triggered short auditory tone feedback (single-task situation). Whereas under the uncertain situation, the feedback could randomly be either the previous tone or a short musical rhythm. No additional action was required upon the music feedback, and the same secondary nose-poking action was required upon the tone feedback (dual-task situation); therefore, the coming task was uncertain before action initiation. We recorded single-unit activity from the mPFC when the rats were performing the tasks. We found that in the dual task, when uncertainty was introduced, many mPFC neurons were actively engaged in dealing with the uncertainty before the task initiation, suggesting that the rats could be aware of the task situation change and encode the information in the mPFC before the action of task initiation.
期刊介绍:
Neuroscience Bulletin (NB), the official journal of the Chinese Neuroscience Society, is published monthly by Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Springer.
NB aims to publish research advances in the field of neuroscience and promote exchange of scientific ideas within the community. The journal publishes original papers on various topics in neuroscience and focuses on potential disease implications on the nervous system. NB welcomes research contributions on molecular, cellular, or developmental neuroscience using multidisciplinary approaches and functional strategies. We feature full-length original articles, reviews, methods, letters to the editor, insights, and research highlights. As the official journal of the Chinese Neuroscience Society, which currently has more than 12,000 members in China, NB is devoted to facilitating communications between Chinese neuroscientists and their international colleagues. The journal is recognized as the most influential publication in neuroscience research in China.