小柯机器人

美国霍华德·休斯医学研究所Karel Svoboda、Sandro Romani等研究人员合作发现，吸引物动态控制决策过程中的皮层信息流。2021年4月19日，国际知名学术期刊《自然—神经科学》在线发表了这一成果。

研究人员训练了小鼠来检测体感皮层的光遗传学刺激。在延迟过程中，即使干扰物诱发的神经活动传入皮层，且不会衰减，但干扰物仍会随着时间的流逝对行为产生影响。取而代之的是，运动皮层中的选择编码活动对干扰物的影响逐渐变得不那么敏感。受过训练可复制运动皮层活动的神经网络表明，对干扰物敏感度的降低是由于编码替代决策的吸引物之间神经活动空间越来越大的分隔所致。

这些结果表明，大脑区域之间的交流可以通过吸引物动态来控制，进而调控对行动的影响程度。

据介绍，决策会在执行之前保留在记忆中，这可能会使决策容易受到分散注意力的感觉输入影响。从感觉区域到运动区域的信息流门控可以保护记忆不受决策过程的干扰，但是背后的网络机制尚不明确。

附：英文原文

Title: Attractor dynamics gate cortical information flow during decision-making

Author: Arseny Finkelstein, Lorenzo Fontolan, Michael N. Economo, Nuo Li, Sandro Romani, Karel Svoboda

Issue&Volume: 2021-04-19

Abstract: Decisions are held in memory until enacted, which makes them potentially vulnerable to distracting sensory input. Gating of information flow from sensory to motor areas could protect memory from interference during decision-making, but the underlying network mechanisms are not understood. Here, we trained mice to detect optogenetic stimulation of the somatosensory cortex, with a delay separating sensation and action. During the delay, distracting stimuli lost influence on behavior over time, even though distractor-evoked neural activity percolated through the cortex without attenuation. Instead, choice-encoding activity in the motor cortex became progressively less sensitive to the impact of distractors. Reverse engineering of neural networks trained to reproduce motor cortex activity revealed that the reduction in sensitivity to distractors was caused by a growing separation in the neural activity space between attractors that encode alternative decisions. Our results show that communication between brain regions can be gated via attractor dynamics, which control the degree of commitment to an action. The flow of information in the brain is regulated over space and time. The authors show that mice can adaptively filter stimuli originating in the sensory cortex. The stimuli are gated by attractor dynamics in the frontal cortex, revealing a mechanism of gating of neural information.

DOI: 10.1038/s41593-021-00840-6

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00840-6

Nature Neuroscience：《自然—神经科学》，创刊于1998年。隶属于施普林格·自然出版集团，最新IF：28.771
官方网址：https://www.nature.com/neuro/
投稿链接：https://mts-nn.nature.com/cgi-bin/main.plex