This is one of the coolest things I have been involved with. Truly flexible navigation in mice. Real insight into how mPFC computes the plans. Great fun to see what PFC is doing with those hippocampal theta sweeps. From the awesome @peterdoohan.bsky.social and (now on bsky) @thomasakam.bsky.social
It has been super fun to work on this, where we learned that:
1) Mouse PFC is needed for model-based override of habits.
2) Separate PFC populations encode a 'policy' and the current 'value'.
3) The policy and value codes alternate theta sweeps towards the goal.
...and much much more!
This project builds on work establishing the behaviour done at Champalimaud in Lisbon with @michaelfsp.bsky.social, Beatriz Godinho, Christian Machens, and @ruimcosta.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
But! @sandra-neuro.bsky.social & co at SWC are working on mini2p recordings on similarly rich cognitive tasks, where we'll be able to link function to detailed anatomy. We share your intuition that these are likely anatomically/genetically distinct cell types :) watch this space!