Context coding in the mouse nucleus accumbens modulates motivationally relevant information.

ABSTRACT: Neural activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is thought to track fundamentally value-centric quantities linked to reward and effort. However, the NAc also contributes to flexible behavior in ways that are difficult to explain based on value signals alone, raising the question of if and how nonvalue signals are encoded in NAc. We recorded NAc neural ensembles while head-fixed mice performed an odor-based biconditional discrimination task where an initial discrete cue modulated the behavioral significance of a subsequently presented reward-predictive cue. We extracted single-unit and population-level correlates related to the cues and found value-independent coding for the initial, context-setting cue. This context signal occupied a population-level coding space orthogonal to outcome-relat

SUBMITTER: Gmaz JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9094556 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature