History-based action selection bias in posterior parietal cortex

Abstract

Making decisions based on choice-outcome history is a crucial, adaptive ability in life. However, the neural circuit mechanisms underlying history-dependent decision-making are poorly understood. In particular, history-related signals have been found in many brain areas during various decision-making tasks, but the causal involvement of these signals in guiding behavior is unclear. Here we addressed this issue utilizing behavioral modeling, two-photon calcium imaging, and optogenetic inactivation in mice. We report that a subset of neurons in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) closely reflect the choice-outcome history and history-dependent decision biases, and PPC inactivation diminishes the history dependency of choice. Specifically, many PPC neurons show history- and bias-tuning during the inter-trial intervals (ITI), and history dependency of choice is affected by PPC inactivation during ITI and not during trial. These results indicate that PPC is a critical region mediating the subjective use of history in biasing action selection.

Feedback inhibition derived from the posterior parietal cortex regulates the neural properties of the mouse visual cortex

“…In this study, we analyzed the function of PPC and found that the area suppressed the activity of V1 constantly, was related to the neuronal properties of V1, but there are some points to be noted. First, the region of the PPC in this study was ~0.5 mm more medial than what other recent studies identified as the PPC (Driscoll, Pettit, Minderer, Chettih, & Harvey, ; Goard, Pho, Woodson, & Sur, ; Hwang, Dahlen, Mukundan, & Komiyama, ). It has been pointed out that the PPC is composed of two distinct areas (medial and lateral PPC) in rats (Reep & Corwin, ), so it is likely that these may be two functionally distinct areas in mice.…”

“…Second, in this study we used the artificial stimulus methods for the PPC activation. They may cause the synchronous firing pattern of the PPC which may be different from that in the physiological activation (Driscoll et al., ; Goard et al., ; Harvey, Coen, & Tank, ; Hwang et al., ), although they were able to reveal the PPC function latent under physiological conditions. And finally, the possibility could not be thoroughly ruled out that the incision we made between the PPC to V1 may impact communication between other medial areas and V1.…”

Architecture and organization of mouse posterior parietal cortex relative to extrastriate areas

“…The most lateral and posterior extent of PPC, area PtP (Paxinos & Franklin, 2012), overlapped partly with anterior area RL. These areas are referred to as "extrastriate", implying a primacy of visual processing (Andermann et al, 2011;Garrett et al, 2014;Marshel et al, 2011;Wang & Burkhalter, 2007), though they overlap considerably with PPC, which has cognitive (Akrami, Kopec, Diamond, & Brody, 2018;Harvey et al, 2012;Hwang et al, 2017;Morcos & Harvey, 2016), navigational (Nitz, 2006(Nitz, , 2012, and movement-related Whitlock et al, 2012) functions that can be expressed independently of visual input. For example, tetrode recordings in unrestrained rats targeting the posterior extent of PPC-appearing to coincide with area AM-showed widespread tuning to self-motion and angular head velocity in addition to visual landmarks (Chen, Lin, Barnes, & McNaughton, 1994;Chen & McNaughton, 1988).…”

“…For several decades, the monkey has served as the premiere model for investigating the behavioral and neurophysiological contributions of PPC, and while PPC in rodents is substantially smaller and less differentiated, recent years have seen an increase in the use of rats and mice. This has been motivated in part by the fact that rodents can be trained to perform a variety of highly specific, PPC-dependent tasks in real-world and virtual reality settings (Brunton, Botvinick, & Brody, 2013;Goard, Pho, Woodson, & Sur, 2016;Harvey, Coen, & Tank, 2012;Hwang, Dahlen, Mukundan, & Komiyama, 2017;Nitz, 2006;Raposo, Sheppard, Schrater, & Churchland, 2012;Whitlock, Pfuhl, Dagslott, Moser, & Moser, 2012;Wilber, Clark, Forster, Tatsuno, & McNaughton, 2014). The advantages of mice in particular include their genetic tractability and compatibility with large-scale recording and imaging techniques, leading to their widespread usage to study population coding and circuit function in every major sector of cortex, including PPC.…”

Dynamic perceptual feature selectivity in primary somatosensory cortex upon reversal learning

“…It is believed that these assemblies are organized in a hierarchical fashion. First-order sensory areas encode lower-order stimulus features, such as textures coarseness (Chen et al, 2013a;Garion et al, 2014;Safaai et al, 2013), object orientation and direction (Hubel and Wiesel, 1959), and sound frequency (Stiebler et al, 1997), whereas more complex features and contextual aspects of a stimulus are encoded by higher-order cortices (Akrami et al, 2018;Felleman and Van Essen, 1991;Hwang et al, 2017;Pho et al, 2018). Nonetheless, the coding in primary sensory cortices can exhibit higher levels of complexity, expressing non-sensory-related signals such as attention (Francis et al, 2018), anticipation (Poort et al, 2015) and behavioral choice (Chen et al, 2015;Francis et al, 2018;Pho et al, 2018;Poort et al, 2015;Yang et al, 2016).…”