Cognitive experience alters cortical involvement in goal-directed navigation
- Harvard Medical School, United States
Abstract
Neural activity in the mammalian cortex has been studied extensively during decision tasks, and recent work aims to identify under what conditions cortex is actually necessary for these tasks. We discovered that mice with distinct cognitive experiences, beyond sensory and motor learning, use different cortical areas and neural activity patterns to solve the same navigation decision task, revealing past learning as a critical determinant of whether cortex is necessary for goal-directed navigation. We used optogenetics and calcium imaging to study the necessity and neural activity of multiple cortical areas in mice with different training histories. Posterior parietal cortex and retrosplenial cortex were mostly dispensable for accurate performance of a simple navigation task. In contrast, these areas were essential for the same simple task when mice were previously trained on complex tasks with delay periods or association switches. Multi-area calcium imaging showed that, in mice with complex-task experience, single-neuron activity had higher selectivity and neuron-neuron correlations were weaker, leading to codes with higher task information. Therefore, past experience is a key factor in determining whether cortical areas have a causal role in goal-directed navigation.
Data availability
Data have been deposited in Dryad with the DOI: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.34tmpg4nr.
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Cognitive experience alters cortical involvement in goal-directed navigationDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.34tmpg4nr.
Article and author information
Author details
Christopher D Harvey
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01 MH107620)
- Christopher D Harvey
JSPS Overseas Research Fellowship
- Shinichiro Kira
EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Sofia Soares
Stuart H.Q. & Victoria Quan Fellowship
- Noah L Pettit
National Institutes of Health (R01 NS089521)
- Christopher D Harvey
National Institutes of Health (R01 NS108410)
- Christopher D Harvey
National Institutes of Health (DP1 MH125776)
- Christopher D Harvey
Louis Perry Jones Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Charlotte Arlt
Alice and Joseph Brooks Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Charlotte Arlt
Uehara Foundation Research Fellowship
- Shinichiro Kira
Leonard and Isabelle Goldenson Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Shinichiro Kira
NARSAD Young Investigator Grant
- Shinichiro Kira
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 experimental procedures were approved by the Harvard Medical School Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (protocol # 00000073-6) and were performed in compliance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
Copyright
© 2022, Arlt 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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Cognitive experience alters cortical involvement in goal-directed navigation
eLife 11:e76051.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.76051
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