Population coding in the rat Prefrontal Cortex and Ventral Tegmental Area during a discrimination task

MININNI C. J; ZANUTTO S., LEW S. E

. New Orleans, LA, USA

Congreso; Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience; 2012

Society for Neuroscience

The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) and Ventral Tegmenta Area (VTA) are key brain regions for understanding learning. The PFC is considered as a desition making area, integrating sensory information and initiating behavioural response. The VTA is involved in processing reward related-information, as well as information about reward-predicting stimuli. In the present work, animals were trained in a lick/no lick sound discrimination task, in which a lick bout was rewarded when it is executed after a 1Khz tone but not after an 8Khz tone. Neural population activity in PFC and VTA were recorded simultaneously during the discrimination task in the head-restrained paradigm. A pool of 77 single cells (34 from PFC and 43 from VTA) were selected for analysis, and the tone discrimination capabilities of each area were assessed. When analized at the single-neuron level, VTA neurons outperform PFC neurons in predicting the tone frequency. Nevertheless, when population measures like averange activity are taking into account, VTA coding capability decreases, while PFC increases its discrimination power. This differencial profile suggest that relevant task information is encoded independently by VTA neurons, and by the population in the PFC.