Dataset Information

Efficient learning mechanisms hold in the social domain and are implemented in the medial prefrontal cortex.

ABSTRACT: When we are learning to associate novel cues with outcomes, learning is more efficient if we take advantage of previously learned associations and thereby avoid redundant learning. The blocking effect represents this sort of efficiency mechanism and refers to the phenomenon in which a novel stimulus is blocked from learning when it is associated with a fully predicted outcome. Although there is sufficient evidence that this effect manifests itself when individuals learn about their own rewards, it remains unclear whether it also does when they learn about others' rewards. We employed behavioral and neuroimaging methods to address this question. We demonstrate that blocking does indeed occur in the social domain and it does so to a similar degree as observed in the individual domain. On the neural level, activations in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) show a specific contribution to blocking and learning-related prediction errors in the social domain. These findings suggest that the efficiency principle that applies to reward learning in the individual domain also applies to that in the social domain, with the mPFC playing a central role in implementing it.

SUBMITTER: Seid-Fatemi A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4420754 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Efficient learning mechanisms hold in the social domain and are implemented in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Seid-Fatemi Azade A Tobler Philippe N PN

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 20141017 5

When we are learning to associate novel cues with outcomes, learning is more efficient if we take advantage of previously learned associations and thereby avoid redundant learning. The blocking effect represents this sort of efficiency mechanism and refers to the phenomenon in which a novel stimulus is blocked from learning when it is associated with a fully predicted outcome. Although there is sufficient evidence that this effect manifests itself when individuals learn about their own rewards, ...[more]

PMID: 25326037

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Project description:The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is thought to learn the relationships between actions and their outcomes. But little is known about what changes to population activity in PFC are specific to learning these relationships. Here we characterize the plasticity of population activity in the medial PFC (mPFC) of male rats learning rules on a Y-maze. First, we show that the population always changes its patterns of joint activity between the periods of sleep either side of a training session on the maze, regardless of successful rule learning during training. Next, by comparing the structure of population activity in sleep and training, we show that this population plasticity differs between learning and nonlearning sessions. In learning sessions, the changes in population activity in post-training sleep incorporate the changes to the population activity during training on the maze. In nonlearning sessions, the changes in sleep and training are unrelated. Finally, we show evidence that the nonlearning and learning forms of population plasticity are driven by different neuron-level changes, with the nonlearning form entirely accounted for by independent changes to the excitability of individual neurons, and the learning form also including changes to firing rate couplings between neurons. Collectively, our results suggest two different forms of population plasticity in mPFC during the learning of action-outcome relationships: one a persistent change in population activity structure decoupled from overt rule-learning, and the other a directional change driven by feedback during behavior.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The PFC is thought to represent our knowledge about what action is worth doing in which context. But we do not know how the activity of neurons in PFC collectively changes when learning which actions are relevant. Here we show, in a trial-and-error task, that population activity in PFC is persistently changing, regardless of learning. Only during episodes of clear learning of relevant actions are the accompanying changes to population activity carried forward into sleep, suggesting a long-lasting form of neural plasticity. Our results suggest that representations of relevant actions in PFC are acquired by reward imposing a direction onto ongoing population plasticity.

Dataset Information

Efficient learning mechanisms hold in the social domain and are implemented in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Publications

Efficient learning mechanisms hold in the social domain and are implemented in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Similar Datasets

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