Whether or not to act is determined by distinct signals from motor thalamus and orbitofrontal cortex to secondary motor cortex
"To act or not to act" is a fundamental decision made in daily life. However, it is unknown how the relevant signals are transmitted to the secondary motor cortex (M2), which is the cortical origin of motor initiation. Here, we found that in a decision-making task in male mice, inputs from the thalamus to M2 positively regulated the action while inputs from the lateral part of the orbitofrontal cortex (LO) negatively regulated it. The motor thalamus that received the basal ganglia outputs transmitted action value-related signals to M2 regardless of whether the animal acted or not. By contrast, a large subpopulation of LO inputs showed decreased activity before and during the action, regardless of the action value. These results suggest that M2 integrates the positive signal of the action value from the motor thalamus with the negative action-biased signal from the LO to finally determine whether to act or not.
Authors
- Eriko Yoshida
- Natsuki Hatano
- Masashi Kondo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8818-8316)
- M Matsuzaki (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3872-4322)
- Shin-Ichiro Terada (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2964-4059)
- Ling Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8902-6001)
- Shin Ishii (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9385-8230)
- Kenta Kobayashi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7389-3693)
- Ken Nakae (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4183-1532)
- Rie Ako
Institutions
- Tokyo University of Science (JP)
- National Institutes of Natural Sciences (JP)
- Kyoto University (JP)
- RIKEN Center for Brain Science (JP)
- National Institute for Physiological Sciences (JP)
- The University of Tokyo (JP)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2025-04-04
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58272-w
- Citations
- 2
- Primary Topic
- Neural dynamics and brain function
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 2.86
Funders
- Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
- Nakatani Foundation for Advancement of Measuring Technologies in Biomedical Engineering
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- National Institute for Physiological Sciences