Visuomotor learning promotes visually evoked activity in the medial prefrontal cortex

Abstract

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is necessary for executing many learned associations between stimuli and movement. It is unclear, however, whether activity in the mPFC reflects sensory or motor aspects of sensorimotor associations and whether it evolves gradually during learning. To address these questions, we recorded cortical activity with widefield calcium imaging while mice learned a visuomotor task. The task involved associating a visual stimulus with a forelimb movement. After learning, the mPFC showed stimulus-evoked activity both during task performance and during passive viewing, when the stimulus evoked no action. This stimulus-evoked activity closely tracked behavioral performance across training, exhibiting jumps between training days. Electrophysiological recordings localized this activity to the secondary motor and anterior cingulate cortex. We conclude that learning a visuomotor task promotes a route for visual information to reach the prefrontal cortex, which develops responses to the relevant visual stimuli even outside the context of the task.