Coherent theta activity in the medial and orbital frontal cortices encodes reward value.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Amarante LM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8457826 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:We examined the contribution of the amygdala to value signals within orbital prefrontal cortex (OFC) and medial prefrontal cortex (MFC). On each trial, monkeys chose between two stimuli that were associated with different quantities of reward. In intact monkeys, as expected, neurons in both OFC and MFC signaled the reward quantity associated with stimuli. Contrasted with MFC, OFC contained a larger proportion of neurons encoding reward quantity and did so with faster response latencies. Removing the amygdala eliminated these differences, mainly by decreasing value coding in OFC. Similar decreases occurred in OFC immediately before and after reward delivery. Although the amygdala projects to both OFC and MFC, we found that it has its greatest influence over reward-value coding in OFC. Notably, amygdala lesions did not abolish value coding in OFC, which shows that OFC's representations of the value of objects, choices, and outcomes depends, in large part, on other sources.
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Project description:Recent hypotheses have posited that orbital frontal cortex (OFC) is important for using inferred consequences to guide behavior. Less clear is OFC's contribution to goal-directed or model-based behavior, where the decision to act is controlled by previous experience with the consequence or outcome. Investigating OFC's role in learning about changed outcomes separate from decision-making is not trivial and often the two are confounded. Here we adapted an incentive learning task to mice, where we investigated processes controlling experience-based outcome updating independent from inferred action control. We found chemogenetic OFC attenuation did not alter the ability to perceive motivational state-induced changes in outcome value but did prevent the experience-based updating of this change. Optogenetic inhibition of OFC excitatory neuron activity selectively when experiencing an outcome change disrupted the ability to update, leaving mice unable to infer the appropriate behavior. Our findings support a role for OFC in learning that controls decision-making.
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