Neural ensembles in the murine medial prefrontal cortex process distinct information during visual perceptual learning

BMC Biology

Research Article

Shihao Lou¹  Xiao Ma¹  Hui Guo¹  Yupeng Yang¹  Yan Liu¹  Wenjing Chen¹  Zhenni Wang¹  Dating Lin² 

[1] Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026, Hefei, China;Intramural Research Program, National Institute On Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, 21224, Baltimore, MD, USA;

关键词: Visual perceptual learning;    Medial prefrontal cortex;    Pyramidal neurons;    Attention;    Reward;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12915-023-01529-x

 received in 2022-08-27, accepted in 2023-01-27,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPerceptual learning refers to an augmentation of an organism’s ability to respond to external stimuli, which has been described in most sensory modalities. Visual perceptual learning (VPL) is a manifestation of plasticity in visual information processing that occurs in the adult brain, and can be used to ameliorate the ability of patients with visual defects mainly based on an improvement of detection or discrimination of features in visual tasks. While some brain regions such as the primary visual cortex have been described to participate in VPL, the way more general high-level cognitive brain areas are involved in this process remains unclear. Here, we showed that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was essential for both the training and maintenance processes of VPL in mouse models.ResultsWe built a new VPL model in a custom-designed training chamber to enable the utilization of miniScopes when mice freely executed the VPL task. We found that pyramidal neurons in the mPFC participate in both the training process and maintenance of VPL. By recording the calcium activity of mPFC pyramidal neurons while mice freely executed the task, distinct ON and OFF neural ensembles tuned to different behaviors were identified, which might encode different cognitive information. Decoding analysis showed that mouse behaviors could be well predicted using the activity of each ON ensemble. Furthermore, VPL recruited more reward-related components in the mPFC.ConclusionWe revealed the neural mechanism underlying vision improvement following VPL and identify distinct ON and OFF neural ensembles in the mPFC that tuned to different information during visual perceptual training. These results uncover an important role of the mPFC in VPL, with more reward-related components being also involved, and pave the way for future clarification of the reward signal coding rules in VPL.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2023

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