Persistent Valence Representations by Ensembles of Anterior Cingulate Cortex Neurons.

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) responds to outcomes of a positive or negative valence, but past studies typically focus on one valence or the other, making it difficult to know how opposing valences are disambiguated. We recorded from ACC neurons as rats received tones followed by aversive, appetitive or null outcomes. The responses to the different tones/outcomes were highly inter-mixed at the single neuron level but combined to produce robust valence-specific representations at the ensemble level.

How Much Does Movement and Location Encoding Impact Prefrontal Cortex Activity? An Algorithmic Decoding Approach in Freely Moving Rats.

Specialized brain structures encode spatial locations and movements, yet there is growing evidence that this information is also represented in the rodent medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Disambiguating such information from the encoding of other types of task-relevant information has proven challenging. To determine the extent to which movement and location information is relevant to mPFC neurons, tetrodes were used to record neuronal activity while limb positions, poses (i.