Mixed selectivity morphs population codes in prefrontal cortex. (December 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Parthasarathy, Aishwarya; Herikstad, Roger; Bong, Jit; Medina, Felipe; Libedinsky, Camilo; Yen, Shih-Cheng
• Is Part Of: Nature neuroscience. Volume 20:Number 12(2017)
• Page Start: 1770
• Page End: 1779
• Publication Date: 2017-12
• Subjects: Neurosciences -- Periodicals; 573.8
• DOI: 10.1038/s41593-017-0003-2
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1097-6256

Abstract

Abstract The prefrontal cortex maintains working memory information in the presence of distracting stimuli. It has long been thought that sustained activity in individual neurons or groups of neurons was responsible for maintaining information in the form of a persistent, stable code. Here we show that, upon the presentation of a distractor, information in the lateral prefrontal cortex was reorganized into a different pattern of activity to create a morphed stable code without losing information. In contrast, the code in the frontal eye fields persisted across different delay periods but exhibited substantial instability and information loss after the presentation of a distractor. We found that neurons with mixed-selective responses were necessary and sufficient for the morphing of code and that these neurons were more abundant in the lateral prefrontal cortex than the frontal eye fields. This suggests that mixed selectivity provides populations with code-morphing capability, a property that may underlie cognitive flexibility. Neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex (but not the frontal eye fields) appear to maintain working memory information when disrupted by a transient distractor, not by using an immutable persistent code but by morphing from one persistent code to another. This code-morphing may provide the lateral prefrontal cortex with cognitive flexibility.