Orbitofrontal neurons acquire responses to 'valueless' Pavlovian cues during unblocking
- National Institute on Drug Abuse, United States
- University of Pittsburg, United States
- University of Maryland School of Medicine, United States
- National Taiwan University, Taiwan
- Johns Hopkins University, United States
Abstract
The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has been described as signaling outcome expectancies or value. Evidence for the latter comes from the studies showing that neural signals in the OFC correlate with value across features. Yet features can co-vary with value, and individual units may participate in multiple ensembles coding different features. Here we used unblocking to test whether OFC neurons would respond to a predictive cue signaling a 'valueless' change in outcome flavor. Neurons were recorded as the rats learned about cues that signaled either an increase in reward number or a valueless change in flavor. We found that OFC neurons acquired responses to both predictive cues. This activity exceeded that exhibited to a 'blocked' cue and was correlated with activity to the actual outcome. These results show that OFC neurons fire to cues with no value independent of what can be inferred through features of the predicted outcome.
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Animal experimentation: Rats were tested at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the NIDA-IRP in accordance with SOM and NIH guidelines (12-CNRB-108).
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This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Orbitofrontal neurons acquire responses to 'valueless' Pavlovian cues during unblocking
eLife 3:e02653.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.02653
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
Locomotion is controlled by spinal circuits that interact with supraspinal drives and sensory feedback from the limbs. These sensorimotor interactions are disrupted following spinal cord injury. The thoracic lateral hemisection represents an experimental model of an incomplete spinal cord injury, where connections between the brain and spinal cord are abolished on one side of the cord. To investigate the effects of such an injury on the operation of the spinal locomotor network, we used our computational model of cat locomotion recently published in eLife (Rybak et al., 2024) to investigate and predict changes in cycle and phase durations following a thoracic lateral hemisection during treadmill locomotion in tied-belt (equal left-right speeds) and split-belt (unequal left-right speeds) conditions. In our simulations, the ‘hemisection’ was always applied to the right side. Based on our model, we hypothesized that following hemisection the contralesional (‘intact’, left) side of the spinal network is mostly controlled by supraspinal drives, whereas the ipsilesional (‘hemisected’, right) side is mostly controlled by somatosensory feedback. We then compared the simulated results with those obtained during experiments in adult cats before and after a mid-thoracic lateral hemisection on the right side in the same locomotor conditions. Our experimental results confirmed many effects of hemisection on cat locomotion predicted by our simulations. We show that having the ipsilesional hindlimb step on the slow belt, but not the fast belt, during split-belt locomotion substantially reduces the effects of lateral hemisection. The model provides explanations for changes in temporal characteristics of hindlimb locomotion following hemisection based on altered interactions between spinal circuits, supraspinal drives, and somatosensory feedback.
