The Activity Of Neuronal Ensembles In The Medial Prefrontal Cortex Of Rats In Operant Conditioning Behavior

In the past,most of the researches have studied the operant conditioning behavior at the level of a single neuron,and few studies on group neurons.in vivo calcium imaging technology can record the activity of hundreds of neurons steadily.Therefore,we intend to use this technique to study the activity patterns of group neurons in operant conditioning task.In this study,we designed a simple behavioral task.Rats on observations,and miniscope was used to record the activity of pyramidal neurons.Rats receive rewards through nose poking,and different amounts of rewards are given according to different duration.The longer rats’ duration is,the larger rewards they can receive.We trained the rats for two weeks and recorded the medial prefrontal cortex(mPFC)pyramidal neurons activity during this process.Behavioral experiment results show that after connecting the calcium imaging device,the behavior of rats was not significantly affected.Rats can quickly learn this task,and after a period of training,they choose more delayed rewards and average duration increases continuously.In vivo calcium imaging results showed that there are two types of neural ensembles with opposite activities in the rat mPFC,which displayed opposing activities to code behavioral information,and there is a significant difference in the number of cells in these two types of neural ensembles;during the behavior of rats,neural ensembles that respond during nose poking recruit new pyramidal neurons.In this study,a stable in vivo calcium imaging method was established,and the activity of neurons in the mPFC of the rat in the operant conditioning task was studied,which laid a solid foundation for our subsequent application of this technology.