Pre-action Neuronal Encoding of Task Situation Uncertainty in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex of Rats.

IF 5.8 2区 医学 Q1 NEUROSCIENCES
Qiulin Hua, Yu Peng, Jianyun Zhang, Baoming Li, Jiyun Peng
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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.

大鼠内侧前额叶皮层任务情境不确定性的动作前神经元编码。
人类和动物都有利用经验和环境信息来组织行为的基本能力。人类和动物经常在不确定的情况下做出决定和准备行动。不确定性会显著影响动物的心理状态,但可能不会反映在行为上。如何在不同情况下“读懂动物的心理状态”是一个挑战。本研究发现,当任务情境从确定变为不确定时,大鼠内侧前额叶皮层(mPFC)的神经元活动可以反映环境的不确定性。老鼠被训练在特定和不确定的情况下执行行为任务。在某些情况下,大鼠被要求简单地重复两个戳鼻子的动作,每个动作都会触发短的听觉音调反馈(单任务情况)。而在不确定的情况下,反馈可能是随机的,要么是之前的音调,要么是短的音乐节奏。音乐反馈不需要额外的动作,而音调反馈则需要同样的二次戳鼻子动作(双任务情况);因此,在行动启动之前,即将到来的任务是不确定的。我们记录了大鼠在执行任务时mPFC的单个单元活动。我们发现,在双重任务中,当引入不确定性时,许多mPFC神经元在任务启动前积极参与处理不确定性,这表明大鼠可以在任务启动前意识到任务情境的变化并在mPFC中编码信息。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Neuroscience bulletin
Neuroscience bulletin NEUROSCIENCES-
CiteScore
7.20
自引率
16.10%
发文量
163
审稿时长
6-12 weeks
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.
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