Back

Medial Prefrontal Cortex Interacts with the Anteromedial Thalamus in Motivation and Dopaminergic Activity

Yang, C.; Hu, Y.; Talishinsky, A. D.; Potter, C. T.; Ramsey, L. A.; Kesner, A. J.; Don, R. F.; Junn, S.; Tan, A.; Pierce, A. F.; Nicolas, C.; Calva, C. B.; Su, C.; Mejia-Aponte, C. A.; Wang, D. V.; Lu, H.; Yang, Y.; Ikemoto, S.

2020-05-21 neuroscience
10.1101/2020.05.19.104026 bioRxiv
Show abstract

How does the prefrontal cortex (PFC) regulate motivated behavior? Our experiments characterize the circuits of the PFC regulating motivation, reinforcement and dopamine activity, revealing a novel cortico-thalamic loop. The stimulation of medial PFC (mPFC) neurons activated many downstream regions, as shown by functional MRI. Axonal terminal stimulation of mPFC neurons in downstream regions, including the anteromedial thalamic nucleus (AM), reinforced behavior and activated midbrain dopaminergic neurons. The stimulation of AM neurons projecting to the mPFC also reinforced behavior and activated dopamine neurons, and mPFC and AM showed a positive-feedback loop organization. Reciprocal excitatory functional connectivity, as well as co-activation of the two regions, was found in human participants who watched reinforcing videos. Our results suggest that this cortico-thalamic loop regulates motivation, reinforcement and dopaminergic neuron activity.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.