Visuomotor learning promotes visually evoked activity in the medial prefrontal cortex

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is necessary for executing many learned associations between stimuli and movement. It is unclear, however, how activity in the mPFC evolves across learning, and how this activity correlates with sensory stimuli and the learned movements they evoke. To address these questions, we re-cord cortical activity with widefield calcium imaging while mice learned to associate a visual stimulus with a forelimb movement. After learning, the mPFC shows stimulus-evoked activity both during task performance and during passive viewing, when the stimulus evokes no action. This stimulus-evoked activity closely tracks behavioral performance across training, with both exhibiting a marked increase between days when mice first learn the task, followed by a steady increase with further training. Electrophysiological recordings local-ized this activity to the secondary motor and anterior cingulate cortex. We conclude that learning a visuomo-tor task promotes a route for visual information to reach the prefrontal cortex.

Automated summary

This study reveals that learning a motor task promotes a pathway for visual information to reach the prefrontal cortex, and the correlation between the cortical response to stimuli and the learned movements increases gradually during training.