Rat anterior cingulate cortex recalls features of remote reward locations after disfavoured reinforcements

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Abstract

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) encodes information supporting mnemonic and cognitive processes. We show here that a rat's position can be decoded with high spatiotemporal resolution from ACC activity. ACC neurons encoded the current state of the animal and task, except for brief excursions that sometimes occurred at target feeders. During excursions, the decoded position became more similar to a remote target feeder than the rat's physical position. Excursions recruited activation of neurons encoding choice and reward, and the likelihood of excursions at a feeder was inversely correlated with feeder preference. These data suggest that the excursion phenomenon was related to evaluating real or fictive choice outcomes, particularly after disfavoured reinforcements. We propose that the multiplexing of position with choice-related information forms a mental model isomorphic with the task space, which can be mentally navigated via excursions to recall multimodal information about the utility of remote locations.

Data availability

The pre-processed data used for the paper and the computer codes for the artificial neural network are available for download at a publicly accessible repository (https://github.com/mashhoori/ACC-Recalls-Features-of-Remote-Reward-Locations).

Article and author information

Author details

Ali Mashhoori

Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Saeedeh Hashemniayetorshizi

Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Bruce L McNaughton

Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
David Euston

Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Aaron J Gruber

Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada

For correspondence
aaron.gruber@uleth.ca

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2700-5429

Funding

Alberta Innovates - Health Solutions

Bruce L McNaughton
David Euston
Aaron J Gruber

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Saeedeh Hashemniayetorshizi
Bruce L McNaughton
David Euston
Aaron J Gruber

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All procedures were approved by the university's animal welfare committee (Protocol #1512) in accordance with the Canadian Council on Animal Care.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.