Dataset Information

Combined Social and Spatial Coding in a Descending Projection from the Prefrontal Cortex.

ABSTRACT: Social behaviors are crucial to all mammals. Although the prelimbic cortex (PL, part of medial prefrontal cortex) has been implicated in social behavior, it is not clear which neurons are relevant or how they contribute. We found that PL contains anatomically and molecularly distinct subpopulations that target three downstream regions that have been implicated in social behavior: the nucleus accumbens (NAc), amygdala, and ventral tegmental area. Activation of NAc-projecting PL neurons (PL-NAc), but not the other subpopulations, decreased the preference for a social target. To determine what information PL-NAc neurons convey, we selectively recorded from them and found that individual neurons were active during social investigation, but only in specific spatial locations. Spatially specific manipulation of these neurons bidirectionally regulated the formation of a social-spatial association. Thus, the unexpected combination of social and spatial information within the PL-NAc may contribute to social behavior by supporting social-spatial learning.

SUBMITTER: Murugan M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5889923 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Combined Social and Spatial Coding in a Descending Projection from the Prefrontal Cortex.

Murugan Malavika M Jang Hee Jae HJ Park Michelle M Miller Ellia M EM Cox Julia J Taliaferro Joshua P JP Parker Nathan F NF Bhave Varun V Hur Hong H Liang Yupu Y Nectow Alexander R AR Pillow Jonathan W JW Witten Ilana B IB

Cell 20171207 7

Social behaviors are crucial to all mammals. Although the prelimbic cortex (PL, part of medial prefrontal cortex) has been implicated in social behavior, it is not clear which neurons are relevant or how they contribute. We found that PL contains anatomically and molecularly distinct subpopulations that target three downstream regions that have been implicated in social behavior: the nucleus accumbens (NAc), amygdala, and ventral tegmental area. Activation of NAc-projecting PL neurons (PL-NAc), ...[more]

PMID: 29224779

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Project description:Natural environments convey information through multiple sensory modalities, all of which contribute to people's percepts. Although it has been shown that visual or auditory content of scene categories can be decoded from brain activity, it remains unclear how humans represent scene information beyond a specific sensory modality domain. To address this question, we investigated how categories of scene images and sounds are represented in several brain regions. A group of healthy human subjects (both sexes) participated in the present study, where their brain activity was measured with fMRI while viewing images or listening to sounds of different real-world environments. We found that both visual and auditory scene categories can be decoded not only from modality-specific areas, but also from several brain regions in the temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortex (PFC). Intriguingly, only in the PFC, but not in any other regions, categories of scene images and sounds appear to be represented in similar activation patterns, suggesting that scene representations in PFC are modality-independent. Furthermore, the error patterns of neural decoders indicate that category-specific neural activity patterns in the middle and superior frontal gyri are tightly linked to categorization behavior. Our findings demonstrate that complex scene information is represented at an abstract level in the PFC, regardless of the sensory modality of the stimulus.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Our experience in daily life includes multiple sensory inputs, such as images, sounds, or scents from the surroundings, which all contribute to our understanding of the environment. Here, for the first time, we investigated where and how in the brain information about the natural environment from multiple senses is merged to form modality-independent representations of scene categories. We show direct decoding of scene categories across sensory modalities from patterns of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). We also conclusively tie these neural representations to human categorization behavior by comparing patterns of errors between a neural decoder and behavior. Our findings suggest that PFC is a central hub for integrating sensory information and computing modality-independent representations of scene categories.

Dataset Information

Combined Social and Spatial Coding in a Descending Projection from the Prefrontal Cortex.

Publications

Combined Social and Spatial Coding in a Descending Projection from the Prefrontal Cortex.

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