scholarly journals Whole brain dynamics during optogenetic self-stimulation of the medial prefrontal cortex in mice

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher G. Cover ◽  
Andrew J. Kesner ◽  
Shehzad Ukani ◽  
Elliot A. Stein ◽  
Satoshi Ikemoto ◽  
...  

AbstractIntracranial self-stimulation, in which an animal performs an operant response to receive regional brain electrical stimulation, is a widely used procedure to study motivated behavior. While local neuronal activity has long been measured immediately before or after the operant, imaging the whole brain in real-time remains a challenge. Herein we report a method that permits functional MRI (fMRI) of brain dynamics while mice are cued to perform an operant task: licking a spout to receive optogenetic stimulation to the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) during a cue ON, but not cue OFF. Licking during cue ON results in activation of a widely distributed network consistent with underlying MPFC projections, while licking during cue OFF (without optogenetic stimulation) leads to negative fMRI signal in brain regions involved in acute extinction. Noninvasive whole brain readout combined with circuit-specific neuromodulation opens an avenue for investigating adaptive behavior in both healthy and disease models.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic I. Standage ◽  
Corson N. Areshenkoff ◽  
Daniel J. Gale ◽  
Joseph Y. Nashed ◽  
J. Randall Flanagan ◽  
...  

AbstractIndividuals exhibit differences in learning ability, the neural bases of which are unclear. We used human functional MRI to show that whole-brain network dynamics during the early stages of sensorimotor adaptation predict the patterns of learning that emerge across two days of adaptation and readaptation. A clustering of participant behavioural data revealed three distinct profiles of learners: individuals who learned quickly on both days, individuals who learned slowly on both days, and individuals who learned slowly on the first day, but quickly on the second day. These learning profiles were related to the degree of whole-brain modular reconfiguration exhibited during early learning on the first day, and with the selective recruitment of a cognitive network of brain regions, including areas in anterior temporal and prefrontal cortex. These findings demonstrate that across-day profiles of adaptation can be traced to differences in brain dynamics that manifest during initial learning.


2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (48) ◽  
pp. 16082-16090 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. E. Covington ◽  
M. K. Lobo ◽  
I. Maze ◽  
V. Vialou ◽  
J. M. Hyman ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seongmin A. Park ◽  
Douglas S. Miller ◽  
Erie D. Boorman

ABSTRACTGeneralizing experiences to guide decision making in novel situations is a hallmark of flexible behavior. It has been hypothesized such flexibility depends on a cognitive map of an environment or task, but directly linking the two has proven elusive. Here, we find that discretely sampled abstract relationships between entities in an unseen two-dimensional (2-D) social hierarchy are reconstructed into a unitary 2-D cognitive map in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. We further show that humans utilize a grid-like code in several brain regions, including entorhinal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex, for inferred direct trajectories between entities in the reconstructed abstract space during discrete decisions. Moreover, these neural grid-like codes in the entorhinal cortex predict neural decision value computations in the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction area during choice. Collectively, these findings show that grid-like codes are used by the human brain to infer novel solutions, even in abstract and discrete problems, and suggest a general mechanism underpinning flexible decision making and generalization.


1993 ◽  
Vol 231 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Manuel R. Ferrer ◽  
Raimundo Sabater ◽  
Jose Antonio Saez

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. 1357-1370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingtao Sun ◽  
Xiangning Li ◽  
Miao Ren ◽  
Mengting Zhao ◽  
Qiuyuan Zhong ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (9) ◽  
pp. 941-949
Author(s):  
Laura Finlayson-Short ◽  
Christopher G Davey ◽  
Ben J Harrison

Abstract Self-referential and social processing are often engaged concurrently in naturalistic judgements and elicit activity in overlapping brain regions. We have termed this integrated processing ‘self-other referential processing’ and developed a task to measure its neural correlates. Ninety-eight healthy young people aged 16–25 (M = 21.5 years old, 67% female) completed our novel functional magnetic resonance imaging task. The task had two conditions, an active self-other referential processing condition in which participants rated how much they related to emotional faces and a control condition. Rating relatedness required thinking about oneself (self-referential processing) and drawing a comparison to an imagined other (social processing). Self-other referential processing elicited activity in the default mode network and social cognition system; most notably in the ‘core self’ regions of the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. Relatedness and emotional valence directly modulated activity in these core self areas, while emotional valence additionally modulated medial prefrontal cortex activity. This shows the key role of the medial prefrontal cortex in constructing the ‘social-affective self’. This may help to unify disparate models of medial prefrontal cortex function, demonstrating its role in coordinating multiple processes—self-referential, social and affective processing—to allow the self to exist in a complex social world.


Author(s):  
Dale T Tovar ◽  
Robert S Chavez

Abstract The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is among the most consistently implicated brain regions in social and affective neuroscience. Yet, this region is also highly functionally heterogeneous across many domains and has diverse patterns of connectivity. The extent to which the communication of functional networks in this area is facilitated by its underlying structural connectivity fingerprint is critical for understanding how psychological phenomena are represented within this region. In the current study, we combined diffusion magnetic resonance imaging and probabilistic tractography with large-scale meta-analysis to investigate the degree to which the functional co-activation patterns of the MPFC is reflected in its underlying structural connectivity. Using unsupervised machine learning techniques, we compared parcellations between the two modalities and found congruence between parcellations at multiple spatial scales. Additionally, using connectivity and coactivation similarity analyses, we found high correspondence in voxel-to-voxel similarity between each modality across most, but not all, subregions of the MPFC. These results provide evidence that meta-analytic functional coactivation patterns are meaningfully constrained by underlying neuroanatomical connectivity and provide convergent evidence of distinct subregions within the MPFC involved in affective processing and social cognition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 763
Author(s):  
Michael C. Salling ◽  
Neil L. Harrison

The hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated channel (HCN), which underlies the hyperpolarization-activated cation current (Ih), has diverse roles in regulating neuronal excitability across cell types and brain regions. Recently, HCN channels have been implicated in preclinical models of substance abuse including alcohol. In the prefrontal cortex of rodents, HCN expression and Ih magnitude are developmentally regulated during adolescence and may be vulnerable to alcohol’s effects. In mice, binge alcohol consumption during the adolescent period results in a sustained reduction in Ih that coincides with increased alcohol consumption in adulthood, yet the direct role HCN channels have on alcohol consumption are unknown. Here, we show that the genetic deletion of Hcn1 causes an increase in alcohol preference on intermittent 2-bottle choice task in homozygous null (HCN1−/−) male mice compared to wild-type littermates without affecting saccharine or quinine preference. The targeted viral deletion of HCN1 in pyramidal neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex resulted in a gradual loss of Hcn1 expression and a reduction in Ih magnitude during adolescence, however, this did not significantly affect alcohol consumption or preference. We conclude that while HCN1 regulates alcohol preference, the genetic deletion of Hcn1 in the medial prefrontal cortex does not appear to be the locus for this effect.


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