1. Orbitofrontal control of visual cortex gain promotes visual associative learning
- Author
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Zhewei Zhang, Zhi-Yu Zhang, Yan-Gang Sun, Juan Deng, Tianming Yang, Haishan Yao, and Dechen Liu
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Light ,genetic structures ,Photic Stimulation ,Science ,Prefrontal Cortex ,General Physics and Astronomy ,Optogenetics ,Stimulus (physiology) ,Neural circuits ,behavioral disciplines and activities ,Article ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Reward ,Task Performance and Analysis ,medicine ,Animals ,Learning ,lcsh:Science ,Visual Cortex ,Multidisciplinary ,Behavior, Animal ,Lasers ,musculoskeletal, neural, and ocular physiology ,Excitatory Postsynaptic Potentials ,Visual task ,General Chemistry ,Axons ,Associative learning ,Mice, Inbred C57BL ,030104 developmental biology ,Visual cortex ,medicine.anatomical_structure ,Inhibitory Postsynaptic Potentials ,nervous system ,Orbitofrontal cortex ,lcsh:Q ,Visual system ,Psychology ,Neuroscience ,Learning behavior ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,psychological phenomena and processes - Abstract
The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) encodes expected outcomes and plays a critical role in flexible, outcome-guided behavior. The OFC projects to primary visual cortex (V1), yet the function of this top-down projection is unclear. We find that optogenetic activation of OFC projection to V1 reduces the amplitude of V1 visual responses via the recruitment of local somatostatin-expressing (SST) interneurons. Using mice performing a Go/No-Go visual task, we show that the OFC projection to V1 mediates the outcome-expectancy modulation of V1 responses to the reward-irrelevant No-Go stimulus. Furthermore, V1-projecting OFC neurons reduce firing during expectation of reward. In addition, chronic optogenetic inactivation of OFC projection to V1 impairs, whereas chronic activation of SST interneurons in V1 improves the learning of Go/No-Go visual task, without affecting the immediate performance. Thus, OFC top-down projection to V1 is crucial to drive visual associative learning by modulating the response gain of V1 neurons to non-relevant stimulus., The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) encodes expected outcomes and plays a key role in outcome-guided behavior. The authors show here that the top-down projection from the OFC to the visual cortex drives visual associative learning by modulating the response gain of V1 neurons to non-relevant stimuli.
- Published
- 2020