Heterogeneous medial prefrontal cortex ensembles exhibit reproducible internal temporal dynamics during choice...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Decision-making integrates sensory input, internal states, and learned rules.
• The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is crucial for decision-making.
• Temporal organization of mPFC neural activity during decision-making is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate the temporal organization of population-level neural activity in the mPFC during a decision-making task.
• Characterize how mPFC neural dynamics relate to trial progression and choice behavior.
• Explore the relationship between single-neuron responses and population-level dynamics in the mPFC.

Main Methods:

• In vivo calcium imaging in male mice performing a visual cue-dependent location-choice task.
• Analysis of neuronal population activity, including dimensionality reduction and temporal structure assessment.
• Circular phase decoding to track trial progression and hierarchical clustering to identify response profiles.

Main Results:

• mPFC population activity displayed stable, low-dimensional, and reproducible temporal structure across trials.
• Internal population dynamics tracked trial progression through pre-stimulus, stimulus, and post-stimulus phases.
• Heterogeneous single-neuron responses were organized into temporally distinct profiles, with choice-related information decoded from mPFC activity, unlike in the somatosensory cortex.

Conclusions:

• mPFC population activity is reproducibly temporally organized during decision-making.
• This temporal organization links heterogeneous single-neuron responses to population-level dynamics.
• Findings provide insights into the neural mechanisms coordinating diverse neuronal activity over time for goal-directed behavior.