1. Neuroscience

Control of adaptive action selection by secondary motor cortex during flexible visual categorization

  1. Tian-Yi Wang
  2. Jing Liu
  3. Haishan Yao  Is a corresponding author
  1. Institute of Neuroscience, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54474
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  1. Tian-Yi Wang
  2. Jing Liu
  3. Haishan Yao
(2020)
Control of adaptive action selection by secondary motor cortex during flexible visual categorization
eLife 9:e54474.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54474
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Abstract

Adaptive action selection during stimulus categorization is an important feature of flexible behavior. To examine neural mechanism underlying this process, we trained mice to categorize the spatial frequencies of visual stimuli according to a boundary that changed between blocks of trials in a session. Using a model with a dynamic decision criterion, we found that sensory history was important for adaptive action selection after the switch of boundary. Bilateral inactivation of the secondary motor cortex (M2) impaired adaptive action selection by reducing the behavioral influence of sensory history. Electrophysiological recordings showed that M2 neurons carried more information about upcoming choice and previous sensory stimuli when sensorimotor association was being remapped than when it was stable. Thus, M2 causally contributes to flexible action selection during stimulus categorization, with the representations of upcoming choice and sensory history regulated by the demand to remap stimulus-action association.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are available on Dryad https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1c59zw3rs. Source data files have been provided for Figures 1-6.

The following data sets were generated

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Author details

  1. Tian-Yi Wang

    State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Institute of Neuroscience, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6488-339X

  2. Jing Liu

    State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Institute of Neuroscience, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  3. Haishan Yao

    State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Institute of Neuroscience, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
    For correspondence
    haishanyao@ion.ac.cn
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4974-9197

Funding

Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB32010200)

  • Haishan Yao

Shanghai Municiple Science and Technology Major Project (2018SHZDZX05)

  • Haishan Yao

National Natural Science Foundation of China (31571079,31771151)

  • Haishan Yao

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

Ethics

Animal experimentation: Animal use procedures were approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee at the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences (approval number NA-013-2019), and were in accordance with the guidelines of the Animal Advisory Committee at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences.

Copyright

© 2020, Wang 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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  1. Tian-Yi Wang
  2. Jing Liu
  3. Haishan Yao
(2020)
Control of adaptive action selection by secondary motor cortex during flexible visual categorization
eLife 9:e54474.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54474

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54474

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