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Contexts play critical roles in many important aspects of an animal's routine functions, such as the interpretation of incoming signals and retrieved memories. The roles played by prefrontal cortex (PFC) neurons in the coding of contexts have been largely studied in relation to aversive stimuli (such as foot shock in conditioned fear). Whether PFC neurons may code contexts that mice encounter in everyday life, such as their home cage, is poorly understood. Here, we report the identification of a subpopulation of ventral medial PFC (vmPFC) neurons which change their spike rates when mice enter or leave their home cages. Both increase (ON units) and decrease (OFF units) in spike rate were observed, with about 2/3 of neurons showing decrease and 1/3 showing increase. These changes were evident whenever transitions occur from home cage to a different environment regardless of the novelty of the environments. In addition, changes in firing rate were not affected when mice entering a context where fear conditioning had taken place after contextual or auditory/cued fear conditioning. Furthermore, we found that the differential spike rates of ON and OFF units appear to allow mice to recognize that they are inside their home cages. Together, vmPFC neural spiking appears to enable the encoding of "home cage".
Pubmed ID: 30300701
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Multi paradigm numerical computing environment and fourth generation programming language developed by MathWorks. Allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, Fortran and Python. Used to explore and visualize ideas and collaborate across disciplines including signal and image processing, communications, control systems, and computational finance.
View all literature mentionsData analysis software for neurophysiology with a multitude of features, including: * Import of native data files created by many popular data acquisition systems * All standard histogram and raster analyses * Shift predictors in crosscorrelograms and color markers in perievent rasters * Joint PSTH, burst analysis and many more analyses of timestamped data * Spectral analysis of spike and continuous data * 3D data view and animation * Fully customizable WYSIWYG graphics * Custom analysis and batch mode processing with internal scripting language * Direct data link to Matlab and Excel * Statistical tests via direct link to R-project
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