Topic: subgoals

Navigating towards goals in crowded spaces is a complex behavior that requires keeping track of relative positions of goals and obstacles. Animals can solve this by breaking down routes into subgoals - intermediate waypoints. It is not known how the brain represents subgoals, or how their representation differs from static spatial features of the environment. Building on work showing that mice use a subgoal strategy to escape to shelter, we placed mice in an arena divided in half by a barrier, with a shelter in the bottom half. The barrier leaves a gap on one side which mice learn to use as a

Studies suggest that adaptive behaviors arise from multiple decision systems in the brain, and spatial complexity affects these processes. Three regions are hypothesized to make distinct contributions: hippocampus (HC) — encoding state-space and enabling flexible behaviors, dorsolateral striatum (DLS) — encoding action-chains and enabling automated behaviors, and prefrontal cortex (mPFC) — encoding task-space and strategy-setting. We simultaneously recorded across these regions, and in a separate cohort we chemogenetically inhibited mPFC on a rule-switch task, the left/right/alternation foragi