Fos expression and task-related neuronal activity in rat cerebral cortex after instrumental learning

Learning has been shown to induce changes in neuronal gene expression and to produce development of task-specific neuronal activity. The connection between these two features of neuronal plasticity remains of a great interest. To address this issue we compared distribution of c-Fos expressing and task-related neurons in the rat cerebral cortex following instrumental learning of appetitive lever-press task. The number of Fos-positive neurons was determined immunohistochemically in the retrosplenial and the motor cortex of naive ("control" group), newly trained ("acquisition" group) and overtrained ("performance" group) animals. A significant activation of c-Fos expression was observed in the neurons of the retrosplenial but not motor cortex in the "acquisition" group rats, as compared with the "control" and "performance" groups. In accordance with this c-Fos expression difference, the retrosplenial cortex of the trained animals contained significantly more neurons with lever-press-related activity than the motor cortex. Therefore, the two examined cortical areas showed a parallel between experience-dependent induction of c-Fos and development of task-related neuronal activity. These data support a notion that learning-induced activation of c-Fos is associated with long-term neurophysiological changes produced by training.