Representation of sensorimotor states in mouse medial prefrontal cortex

Abstract

When foraging for food, animals must track the sensory events of their environment and their own actions over time. Memory of these sensorimotor events is crucial for learning the values of different options and foraging policies 1. To investigate the role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in foraging behavior, we conducted experiments on mice using foraging tasks that required integration of past oro-sensory rewards and past choices. We found that the mPFC selectively represents sensorimotor events, which organize into a spatiotemporal map encoding location and temporal delay of past rewards and choices relative to the animal's current epoch in time. These representations of sensorimotor events, which we refer to as sensorimotor state representations, play a critical role in foraging behavior. Inactivation of the mPFC affected the integration of past rewards and choices into the mice's decisions, leading to a decrease in reward harvesting efficiency, particularly for longer temporal delays. Behavioral models that compute values and policy failed to capture the representations in mPFC. Our results suggest that the mPFC plays a critical role in representing sensorimotor states independently of value and policy computations. This highlights the importance of considering sensorimotor state representation in the mPFC in understanding foraging behavior.