Rat anterior cingulate cortex recalls features of remote reward locations after disfavoured reinforcements
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
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.
Reviewing Editor
- Timothy E Behrens, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
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.
Version history
- Received: June 21, 2017
- Accepted: April 4, 2018
- Accepted Manuscript published: April 17, 2018 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: May 2, 2018 (version 2)
- Version of Record updated: September 9, 2021 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2018, Mashhoori et al.
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.
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