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SUMMARY:How are structure representations built in prefrontal cortex?
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260512T130000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260512T140000
DTSTAMP:20260512T052640Z
UID:406a567b-ae3c-f111-88b4-7ced8d9a5614
CREATED:20260420T114553Z
DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\nOur world has structure - sensory statistics\, pre
 dictable rewards or stable environments. Being able to learn such structur
 e and use it in novel scenarios helps us react fast and efficiently. Previ
 ous work has identified representations in prefrontal cortex (PFC) that em
 bed complex sequential task structures on top of a scaffold that encodes t
 he progress to individual goals. We hypothesized that this goal progress r
 epresentation is a fundamental building block that enables rapid learning 
 by mapping tasks into hierarchical subgoals in PFC. Here we developed a fr
 amework to test (1) whether these goal progress representations were prese
 nt before\, and in the very early stages of learning\, (2) whether their l
 ocal connectivity reflects the representational structure before and after
  learning and (3) how higher order structure representations build upon th
 is goal progress encoding. We train head-fixed mice to learn sequences of 
 rewarded landmarks in a stable virtual environment. In parallel\, we use t
 wo-photon calcium imaging in PFC to longitudinally track individual neuron
 s from naive to trained stages and perform single cell holographic photost
 imulation to perturb activity and probe local connectivity. We find that P
 FC neurons stably track progress towards individual goals in the environme
 nt as soon as animals learn their first sequence. By identifying those cel
 ls from the naive animal through several stages of pre-task habituation\, 
 we can see that goal-progress neurons already tile the time between regula
 r rewards before any learning and that these neurons maintain their tuning
  across learning. We are now aiming to determine whether this relationship
  is pre-set through local connectivity and whether higher order structure 
 representations upon learning use such goal-progress neurons as a scaffold
 .
LAST-MODIFIED:20260504T194340Z
LOCATION:The Life and Mind Building - Seminar room 7 & 8\, Seminar room 7 
 & 8 The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford   United Kingdom
SPEAKER:Dr Sandra Reinert (The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre)
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