PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Yasir Gallero-Salas
AU  - Balazs Laurenczy
AU  - Fabian F. Voigt
AU  - Ariel Gilad
AU  - Fritjof Helmchen
TI  - Sensory and Behavioral Components of Neocortical Signal Flow in Discrimination Tasks with Short-term Memory
AID  - 10.1101/2020.01.13.904284
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.01.13.904284
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/14/2020.01.13.904284.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/14/2020.01.13.904284.full
AB  - In neocortex, each sensory modality engages distinct primary and secondary areas that route information further to association areas. Where signal flow may converge for maintaining information in short-term memory and how behavior may influence signal routing remain open questions. Using wide-field calcium imaging, we compared cortex-wide neuronal activity in layer 2/3 for mice trained in auditory and whisker-based tactile discrimination tasks with delayed response. In both tasks, mice were either active or passive during stimulus presentation, engaging in body movements or sitting quietly. Irrespective of behavioral strategy, auditory and tactile stimulation activated spatially segregated subdivisions of posterior parietal cortex (areas A and RL, respectively). In the subsequent delay period, in contrast, behavioral strategy rather than sensory modality determined where short-term memory was located: frontomedially in active trials and posterolaterally in passive trials. Our results suggest behavior-dependent routing of sensory-driven cortical information flow from modality-specific PPC subdivisions to higher association areas.