杭州师范大学彭吉云团队的一项最新研究提出大鼠内侧前额叶皮层任务情境不确定性的动作前神经元编码。2025年7月27日出版的《神经科学通报》发表了这项成果。

该课题组研究人员报道了当任务情境从确定到不确定时，大鼠内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）的神经元活动可以反映环境的不确定性。老鼠被训练在特定和不确定的情况下执行行为任务。在某些情况下，大鼠被要求简单地重复两个戳鼻子的动作，每个动作都会触发短的听觉音调反馈（单任务情况）。而在不确定的情况下，反馈可能是随机的，要么是之前的音调，要么是短的数学节奏。

主题反馈不需要额外的动作，音调反馈需要同样的二次戳鼻子动作（双任务情况）；因此，在行动启动之前，即将到来的任务是不确定的。该课题组人员记录了大鼠在执行任务时mPFC的单个单元活动。研究人员发现，在双重任务中，当引入不确定性时，许多mPFC神经元在任务启动前积极参与处理不确定性，这表明大鼠可以在任务启动前意识到任务情境的变化并在mPFC中编码信息。

据悉，人类和动物都有一种基本的能力，可以根据经验和环境信息来组织行为。人类和动物经常在不确定的情况下做出决定和准备行动。不确定性会显著影响动物的心理状态，但可能不会反映在行为上。如何在不同情况下“读懂动物的心理状态”是一个挑战。

附：英文原文

Title: Pre-action Neuronal Encoding of Task Situation Uncertainty in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex of Rats

Author: Hua, Qiulin, Peng, Yu, Zhang, Jianyun, Li, Baoming, Peng, Jiyun

Issue&Volume: 2025-07-27

Abstract: Humans and animals have a fundamental ability to use experiences and environmental information to organize behavior. It often happens that humans and animals make decisions and prepare actions under uncertain situations. Uncertainty would significantly affect the state of animals’ minds, but may not be reflected in behavior. How to “read animals’ mind state” under different situations is a challenge. Here, we report that neuronal activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of rats can reflect the environmental uncertainty when the task situation changes from certain to uncertain. Rats were trained to perform behavioral tasks under certain and uncertain situations. Under certain situations, rats were required to simply repeat two nose-poking actions that each triggered short auditory tone feedback (single-task situation). Whereas under the uncertain situation, the feedback could randomly be either the previous tone or a short musical rhythm. No additional action was required upon the music feedback, and the same secondary nose-poking action was required upon the tone feedback (dual-task situation); therefore, the coming task was uncertain before action initiation. We recorded single-unit activity from the mPFC when the rats were performing the tasks. We found that in the dual task, when uncertainty was introduced, many mPFC neurons were actively engaged in dealing with the uncertainty before the task initiation, suggesting that the rats could be aware of the task situation change and encode the information in the mPFC before the action of task initiation.

DOI: 10.1007/s12264-025-01463-8

Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12264-025-01463-8