Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus represent strategic context even while simultaneously changing representation throughout a task session.

Abstract

Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and hippocampus (HPC) are thought to play complementary roles in a spatial working memory and decision-making network, where spatial information from HPC informs representations in dmPFC, and contextual information from dmPFC biases how HPC recalls that information. We recorded simultaneously from neural ensembles in rodent dmPFC and HPC as rats performed a rule-switching task, and found that ensembles in dmPFC and HPC simultaneously encoded task contingencies and other time-varying information. While ensembles in HPC transitioned to represent new contingencies at the same time as rats updated their strategies to be consistent with the new contingency, dmPFC ensembles transitioned earlier. Neural representations of other time-varying information also changed faster in dmPFC than in HPC. Our results suggest that HPC and dmPFC represent contingencies while simultaneously representing other information which changes over time, and that this contextual information is integrated into hippocampal representations more slowly than in dmPFC.