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Medial Frontal Cortex

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medial frontal cortex

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4 curated items2 Seminars2 ePosters
Updated about 3 years ago
4 items · medial frontal cortex
4 results
SeminarNeuroscience

Internally Organized Abstract Task Maps in the Mouse Medial Frontal Cortex

Mohamady El-Gaby
University of Oxford
Sep 27, 2022

New tasks are often similar in structure to old ones. Animals that take advantage of such conserved or “abstract” task structures can master new tasks with minimal training. To understand the neural basis of this abstraction, we developed a novel behavioural paradigm for mice: the “ABCD” task, and recorded from their medial frontal neurons as they learned. Animals learned multiple tasks where they had to visit 4 rewarded locations on a spatial maze in sequence, which defined a sequence of four “task states” (ABCD). Tasks shared the same circular transition structure (… ABCDABCD …) but differed in the spatial arrangement of rewards. As well as improving across tasks, mice inferred that A followed D (i.e. completed the loop) on the very first trial of a new task. This “zero-shot inference” is only possible if animals had learned the abstract structure of the task. Across tasks, individual medial Frontal Cortex (mFC) neurons maintained their tuning to the phase of an animal’s trajectory between rewards but not their tuning to task states, even in the absence of spatial tuning. Intriguingly, groups of mFC neurons formed modules of coherently remapping neurons that maintained their tuning relationships across tasks. Such tuning relationships were expressed as replay/preplay during sleep, consistent with an internal organisation of activity into multiple, task-matched ring attractors. Remarkably, these modules were anchored to spatial locations: neurons were tuned to specific task space “distances” from a particular spatial location. These newly discovered “Spatially Anchored Task clocks” (SATs), suggest a novel algorithm for solving abstraction tasks. Using computational modelling, we show that SATs can perform zero-shot inference on new tasks in the absence of plasticity and guide optimal policy in the absence of continual planning. These findings provide novel insights into the Frontal mechanisms mediating abstraction and flexible behaviour.

SeminarNeuroscienceRecording

Parametric control of flexible timing through low-dimensional neural manifolds

Manuel Beiran
Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Columbia University & Rajan lab, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Mar 8, 2022

Biological brains possess an exceptional ability to infer relevant behavioral responses to a wide range of stimuli from only a few examples. This capacity to generalize beyond the training set has been proven particularly challenging to realize in artificial systems. How neural processes enable this capacity to extrapolate to novel stimuli is a fundamental open question. A prominent but underexplored hypothesis suggests that generalization is facilitated by a low-dimensional organization of collective neural activity, yet evidence for the underlying neural mechanisms remains wanting. Combining network modeling, theory and neural data analysis, we tested this hypothesis in the framework of flexible timing tasks, which rely on the interplay between inputs and recurrent dynamics. We first trained recurrent neural networks on a set of timing tasks while minimizing the dimensionality of neural activity by imposing low-rank constraints on the connectivity, and compared the performance and generalization capabilities with networks trained without any constraint. We then examined the trained networks, characterized the dynamical mechanisms underlying the computations, and verified their predictions in neural recordings. Our key finding is that low-dimensional dynamics strongly increases the ability to extrapolate to inputs outside of the range used in training. Critically, this capacity to generalize relies on controlling the low-dimensional dynamics by a parametric contextual input. We found that this parametric control of extrapolation was based on a mechanism where tonic inputs modulate the dynamics along non-linear manifolds in activity space while preserving their geometry. Comparisons with neural recordings in the dorsomedial frontal cortex of macaque monkeys performing flexible timing tasks confirmed the geometric and dynamical signatures of this mechanism. Altogether, our results tie together a number of previous experimental findings and suggest that the low-dimensional organization of neural dynamics plays a central role in generalizable behaviors.

ePoster

Internally Organized Abstract Task Maps in the Mouse Medial Frontal Cortex

COSYNE 2022

ePoster

Internally Organized Abstract Task Maps in the Mouse Medial Frontal Cortex

COSYNE 2022