Role of cingulate cortex in controlling sensory-guided motor action

Abstract

Sensory information guides animals to carry out well-controlled motor actions by updating reinforcements associated with it. Rewards facilitate ‘go’ actions to the stimuli, whereas less reward or punishment make animals adequately take ‘no-go’ actions. During the perceptual behaviors, robust activities are recruited at many cortical regions, from the sensory cortex to the frontal motor areas. The cingulate cortex (Cg) has been identified as a key structure that mediates top-down modulation of visual responses in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mice. However, contribution of Cg activity in making proper motor actions to the sensory cues remains to be determined. Here, we investigated functional roles of Cg in performing the visual detection task in head-fixed mice. Pharmacological inactivation of Cg impaired both go (licking after stimuli) and no-go (no-licking without stimuli) actions with increasing impulsive licking actions. By recording single unit activities in Cg and V1, we found that Cg neurons show stronger visually-evoked responses in hit trials than miss trials. Moreover, subset of Cg neurons that are not driven by the stimuli show clear reduction in their activity during the impulsive licking in no-go trials. These action-related activities were not observed in V1 neurons, indicating that Cg neurons receiving visual inputs play crucial roles in transforming sensory information into proper motor actions. Collectively, our data demonstrate that Cg neurons encode both sensory-evoked signals that are transformed to go actions and motor inhibition signals that prevent impulsive actions to execute goal-directed behaviors in mice.