2026年1月7日出版的《自然》杂志发表了法国科学家的一项最新研究成果。来自波尔多大学的Daniel Jercog小组提出了学习线索的前额叶神经几何结构指导有动机的行为。

在这里，该课题组人员监测了自由运动雄性小鼠dmPFC中钙成像的单个神经元群，同时区分预测不同奖励或惩罚结果的刺激，这使得显著性、价态和价值信息的分离成为可能。研究小组发现dmPFC群体主要编码习得刺激的食欲值和厌恶值，而亚群体沿正交信息轴编码价值和显著值。他们的研究结果强调了在dmPFC网络的联想学习过程中，刺激的价值、显著性和效价的并行多面群体编码，因此dmPFC神经元表征的几何形状动态地塑造了食欲和厌恶的动机行为。

据悉，动物不断地评估周围环境，以决定是接近有回报的机会，还是避开潜在的威胁。对环境刺激赋予适当的重要性不仅对生存至关重要，而且也是包括人类在内的物种共有的目标导向行为的复杂形式的基础。因此，了解大脑如何将这些感觉线索转化为动机行为是神经科学和心理学的核心。背内侧前额叶皮层（dmPFC）是连接相关环境刺激和目标导向行为的关键结构。显著性、效价和价值是定义刺激相关性的关键维度，但dmPFC如何处理和组织这些维度来驱动动机行为尚不清楚。

附：英文原文

Title: Prefrontal neural geometry of learned cues guides motivated behaviours

Author: Winke, Nanci, Lthi, Andreas, Herry, Cyril, Jercog, Daniel

Issue&Volume: 2026-01-07

Abstract: Animals continuously evaluate their surroundings to decide whether to approach rewarding opportunities or avoid potential threats. Assigning the appropriate importance to environmental stimuli is not only crucial for survival but also underlies complex forms of goal-directed behaviour that are shared across species, including humans1,2,3,4. Understanding how the brain translates such sensory cues into motivated behaviours is, therefore, central to neuroscience and psychology. The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is a critical structure that bridges relevant environmental stimuli to goal-directed behaviour. Salience, valence and value are key dimensions defining stimulus relevance, but how the dmPFC processes and organizes such dimensions to drive motivated behaviour remains unclear. Here we monitored single-neuron populations in the dmPFC using calcium imaging in freely moving male mice while discriminating between stimuli predicting different reward or punishment outcomes, which enabled an unprecedented dissociation of salience, valence and value information. We found that dmPFC populations primarily encode appetitive and aversive values of learned stimuli and that subpopulations encode valence and salience along orthogonal information axes. Our results highlight a concurrent multifaceted population coding of value, salience and valence of stimuli during associative learning within dmPFC networks, such that the geometry of dmPFC neuronal representations dynamically shapes appetitive and aversive motivated behaviours.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09902-2

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09902-2