
감각 자극에 대한 유연한 반응은 동적 환경에 적응하는 데 필수적이지만, 뇌가 규칙 정보를 어떻게 인코딩하고 이 정보를 사용하여 감각 자극에 대한 행동 반응을 안내하는지는 명확하지 않다. 이 연구에서는 감각운동 피질 영역에서 단일 뉴런 활동이 규칙에 따라 감각 자극 전후에 구분되는 것을 발견했다. 이는 규칙에 따라 준비 상태를 구성하여 감각 정보 처리를 조절할 수 있음을 시사한다.


coremsg

Flexible responses to sensory stimuli based on changing rules are critical for adapting to a dynamic environment. However, it remains unclear how the brain encodes rule information and uses this information to guide behavioral responses to sensory stimuli. Here, we made single-unit recordings while head-fixed mice performed a cross-modal sensory selection task in which they switched between two rules in different blocks of trials: licking in response to tactile stimuli applied to a whisker while rejecting visual stimuli, or licking to visual stimuli while rejecting the tactile stimuli. Along a cortical sensorimotor processing stream including the primary (S1) and secondary (S2) somatosensory areas, and the medial (MM) and anterolateral (ALM) motor areas, the single-trial activity of individual neurons distinguished between the two rules both prior to and in response to the tactile stimulus. Variable rule-dependent responses to identical stimuli could in principle occur via appropriate configuration of pre-stimulus preparatory states of a neural population, which would shape the subsequent response. We hypothesized that neural populations in S1, S2, MM and ALM would show preparatory activity states that were set in a rule-dependent manner to cause processing of sensory information according to the current rule. This hypothesis was supported for the motor cortical areas by findings that (1) the current task rule could be decoded from pre-stimulus population activity in ALM and MM; (2) neural subspaces containing the population activity differed between the two rules; and (3) optogenetic disruption of pre-stimulus states within ALM and MM impaired task performance. Our findings indicate that flexible selection of an appropriate action in response to a sensory input can occur via configuration of preparatory states in the motor cortex.

HIGHLIGHTS 

### Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Rule-based modulation of a sensorimotor transformation across cortical areas

감각운동-변환에-대한-규칙-기반-조절이-피질-영역에-걸쳐-나타남


감각운동 변환에 대한 규칙 기반 조절이 피질 영역에 걸쳐 나타남
