4.8 Article

Cognitive experience alters cortical involvement in goal-directed navigation

Journal

ELIFE
Volume 11, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.76051

Keywords

neocortex; navigation; decision-making; Mouse

Categories

Funding

  1. National Institutes of Health
  2. Louis Perry Jones Postdoctoral Fellowship [R01 MH107620, R01 NS089521, R01 NS108410, DP1 MH125776]
  3. Alice and Joseph Brooks Postdoctoral Fellowship
  4. Uehara Memorial Foundation
  5. Leonard and Isabelle Goldenson Postdoctoral Fellowship
  6. Brain and Behavior Research Foundation
  7. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
  8. EMBO
  9. Mahoney Postdoctoral Fellowship
  10. Stuart H.Q. & Victoria Quan Fellowship

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By studying the neural activity of mice with different cognitive experiences during a navigation decision task, it was found that past learning is a critical determinant of whether the cortex plays a key role in goal-directed navigation.
Neural activity in the mammalian cortex has been studied extensively during decision tasks, and recent work aims to identify under what conditions cortex is actually necessary for these tasks. We discovered that mice with distinct cognitive experiences, beyond sensory and motor learning, use different cortical areas and neural activity patterns to solve the same navigation decision task, revealing past learning as a critical determinant of whether cortex is necessary for goal-directed navigation. We used optogenetics and calcium imaging to study the necessity and neural activity of multiple cortical areas in mice with different training histories. Posterior parietal cortex and retrosplenial cortex were mostly dispensable for accurate performance of a simple navigation task. In contrast, these areas were essential for the same simple task when mice were previously trained on complex tasks with delay periods or association switches. Multiarea calcium imaging showed that, in mice with complex-task experience, single-neuron activity had higher selectivity and neuron-neuron correlations were weaker, leading to codes with higher task information. Therefore, past experience is a key factor in determining whether cortical areas have a causal role in goal-directed navigation.

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