PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jimmie M. Gmaz
AU  - Matthijs A. A. van der Meer
TI  - Context coding in the mouse nucleus accumbens modulates motivationally-relevant information
AID  - 10.1101/2021.06.24.449720
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.06.24.449720
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/02/17/2021.06.24.449720.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/02/17/2021.06.24.449720.full
AB  - Neural activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is thought to track fundamentally value-centric quantities such as current or future expected reward, reward prediction errors, the value of work, opportunity cost, and approach vigor. However, the NAc also contributes to flexible behavior in ways that are difficult to explain based on value signals alone, raising the question of if and how non-value signals are encoded in NAc. We recorded NAc neural ensembles while head-fixed mice performed a biconditional discrimination task where context-setting cues modulated the stimulus-outcome association of subsequently presented reward-predictive cues. We extracted single-unit and population-level correlates of task features, and found value-independent coding for the context cues. This context signal occupied a subspace orthogonal to outcome-predictive representations, and was predictive of subsequent behaviorally-relevant coding. Together, these findings support a circuit-level gating model for how the NAc contributes to behavioral flexibility and provide a novel population-level perspective from which to view NAc computations.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.