Topic: mPFC

Brains can gracefully weed out irrelevant stimuli to guide behavior. This feat is believed to rely on a progressive selection of task-relevant stimuli across the cortical hierarchy, but the specific across-area interactions enabling stimulus selection are still unclear. Here, we propose that population gating, occurring within A1 but controlled by top-down inputs from mPFC, can support across-area stimulus selection. Examining single-unit activity recorded while rats performed an auditory context-dependent task, we found that A1 encoded relevant and irrelevant stimuli along a common dimension

Psychedelics (5-HT2AR agonists) show great promise in treating mental disorders but their effects on neuronal population activity are not clear. Latent dimensions identified by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) capture the dynamics of this interrelated neuronal population activity. We asked whether latent dimensions emerge or disappear as a result of psychedelic administration (acute), and across other naturally occurring brain state transitions (sleep, arousal). Contrastive PCA (cPCA) [Abid et al. (2018), Nature Comm.] was applied to spontaneous brain activity recordings in rodents before