Avian nidopallium caudolaterale mediates decision-making during goal-directed navigation

Previous work demonstrates that nidopallium caudolaterale, which is considered to be an analog of the mammalian prefrontal cortex, participates in goal-directed navigation in pigeons. However, its role remains unclear. To clarify its role, two goal-directed navigation tasks in plus-maze were designed, in which the goal location of one is random, and the other is fixed, i.e., the random-goal task and the fixed-goal task. The animals were trained to run from the starting location to the goal location in accordance with the cue in the plus maze. The goal location is variable for the random-goal task but unchanged for the fixed-goal task. The results have demonstrated that the time point of nidopallium caudolaterale neuron response is consistent with decision-making. During the decision-making, the firing rates significantly increased in two tasks, which can also decode the direction of upcoming movement in the random-goal task. However, the location of decision-making is different between the tasks mentioned above. The decision-making window is at the intersection in the random-goal task, which is a departure in the fixed-goal task. In addition, these results also provide evidence that the neural activities obtained from the nidopallium caudolaterale may contain the decision-making information during goal-directed navigation. These results suggest that the avian nidopallium caudolaterale and the mammalian prefrontal cortex may playa similar role in goal directed spatial decision-making. Additionally, these also may provide some support to understand the neural mechanism of decision making for different species.

Automated summary

The study demonstrates that neural activities from the avian nidopallium caudolaterale may contain decision-making information during goal-directed navigation, especially prominent in the random-goal task. The nidopallium caudolaterale may play a similar role to the mammalian prefrontal cortex in goal-directed spatial decision-making.