Topic: choice-selective activity

Understanding how cortical circuits generate complex behavior requires investigating the cell types that comprise them. Here, much effort has been focused on inhibitory neuron types but the functional roles of distinct classes of excitatory pyramidal neurons (PyNs) are less well un-derstood. We, therefore, used widefield imaging to measure the cortex-wide activity of distinct PyN types and investigated their functional role in mice that performed an auditory decision-making task. We used two mouse lines, expressing the calcium indicator GCaMP6s in two major PyN types: FezF2 for pyramidal-tract

How are actions linked with subsequent outcomes to guide choices? The nucleus accumbens (NAc), which is implicated in this process, receives glutamatergic inputs from the prelimbic cortex (PL) and midline regions of the thalamus (mTH). However, little is known about what is represented in PL or mTH neurons that project to NAc (PL-NAc and mTH-NAc). By comparing these inputs during a reinforcement learning task in mice, we discovered that i) PL-NAc preferentially represents actions and choices, ii) mTH-NAc preferentially represents cues, iii) choice-selective activity in PL-NAc is organized in s