title: Medial Frontal Circuit Dynamics Represents Probabilistic Choices for Unfamiliar Sensory Experience.
abstract: Neurons in medial frontal cortex (MFC) receive sensory signals that are crucial for decision-making behavior. While decision-making is easy for familiar sensory signals, it becomes more elaborative when sensory signals are less familiar to animals. It remains unclear how the population of neurons enables the coordinate transformation of such a sensory input into ambiguous choice responses. Furthermore, whether and how cortical oscillations temporally coordinate neuronal firing during this transformation has not been extensively studied. Here, we recorded neuronal population responses to familiar or unfamiliar auditory cues in rat MFC and computed their probabilistic evolution. Population responses to familiar sounds organize into neuronal trajectories containing multiplexed sensory, motor, and choice information. Unfamiliar sounds, in contrast, evoke trajectories that travel under the guidance of familiar paths and eventually diverge to unique decision states. Local field potentials exhibited beta- (15-20 Hz) and gamma-band (50-60 Hz) oscillations to which neuronal firing showed modest phase locking. Interestingly, gamma oscillation, but not beta oscillation, increased its power abruptly at some timepoint by which neural trajectories for different choices were near maximally separated. Our results emphasize the importance of the evolution of neural trajectories in rapid probabilistic decisions that utilize unfamiliar sensory information.
authors.affiliation: RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.
authors.forename: Takashi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Handa
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Informatics, Kogakuin University, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 163-8677, Japan.
authors.forename: Takashi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Takekawa
authors.affiliation: RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.
authors.forename: Rie
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Harukuni
authors.affiliation: Brain Science Institute, Tamagawa University, Machida, Tokyo 194-8610, Japan.
authors.forename: Yoshikazu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Isomura
authors.affiliation: RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.
authors.forename: Tomoki
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Fukai
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D000344:Afferent Pathways / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology*; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D051381:Rats; D020318:Rats, Long-Evans; D012677:Sensation / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: auditory discrimination; decision-making; multi-electrode recordings; oscillation; sequence