Hippocampal-prefrontal interaction in schema generation

我们的大脑产生刺激和抽象规则的表征，以帮助我们解决日常生活中遇到的复杂任务。过去的研究已经表明海马体中的神经元如何编码世界的结构，外部实体之间的关系，如2D空间组织位置或动物之间的社会等级。与这种世界结构相反，内侧额叶皮层（mFC）涉及代表行为结构，编码规则，这些规则构成了我们复杂的目标导向行为，这些行为可以在不同的背景下推广。我们的实验室已经研究并揭示了内侧额叶神经元如何编码行为结构的潜在机制。然而，这种表征如何与世界结构的表征相互作用仍然是未知的，因此需要进一步的研究。在这里，我们的目标是进一步探讨海马编码的世界结构和内侧额叶编码的行为结构可能相互作用，以指导适应性行为。我们将通过在动物执行目标导向任务时共同记录海马和mFC的活动，并通过光遗传学操纵海马神经元的活动来评估两个区域之间的因果相互作用来实现这一目标。这些实验应该揭示了产生灵活行为的两个关键区域之间的相互作用。BBSRC的相关优先事项：生物科学的系统方法，数据驱动的生物学。

Our brain generates representations of stimuli and abstract rules to help us solve complex tasks that we encounter in everyday life. Past studies have shown how the neurons in the hippocampus could encode the structure of the world, the relationships between external entities such as the 2D space organising locations or the social hierarchy amongst animals. In contrast to this world structure, the medial frontal cortex (mFC) is implicated in representing behavioural structures, encoding rules that structure our complex goal-directed actions that could be generalised across different contexts. Our lab has investigated and revealed a potential mechanism of how medial frontal neurons may encode behavioural structures. Yet, how this representation interacts with representations of world structure out remains largely unknown and thus requires further investigation. Here, we aim to further probe how the hippocampal coding of world structures and the medial frontal coding of behavioural structures may interact to guide adaptive behaviour. We will achieve this by co-recording activity of the Hippocampus and mFC as animals perform goal-directed tasks and optogenetically manipulating the activity of Hippocampal neurons to assess causal interactions between both regions. These experiments should shed light on the interactions between two key regions implicated in generating flexible behaviour. Relevant BBSRC priorities: Systems approaches to biosciences, data-driven biology.