Shifts in attention drive context-dependent subspace encoding in anterior cingulate cortex in mice during decision...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Attention is crucial for decision-making, involving selective enhancement of relevant stimuli and inhibition of distractors.
• The neural mechanisms underlying attention, especially when relevance must be internally constructed, remain less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) generates attention signals when stimulus relevance shifts.
• To elucidate the neural dynamics of internally driven attention and context-gated suppression.

Main Methods:

• Recorded neural activity from populations of neurons in the mouse ACC during an attention-shifting task.
• Utilized analytical proofs and a recurrent neural network (RNN) model to analyze neural data and task dynamics.
• Compared ACC neural activity with recordings from the visual cortex (V1).

Main Results:

• Decoding of irrelevant sensory modalities gradually declined in the ACC, unlike in V1.
• Identified mutually inhibiting connections within the ACC, leading to context-gated suppression.
• Predicted and confirmed a correlation between neural contextual modulation and stimulus drive in the ACC.

Conclusions:

• The ACC plays a key role in internally constructing attention signals through context-gated suppression.
• Mutually inhibiting neural circuits in the ACC are essential for dynamically adjusting attention based on internal context.
• Findings provide insights into the neural basis of flexible decision-making under changing relevance conditions.