Summary: According to research, the orbitofrontal cortex ( OFC) and the hippocampus ( DH) play distinct roles in resolving complex situations where the meaning of stimuli changes depending on context. The DH is crucial for applying prior information to expand learning new relationships, while the OFC helps manage conduct by using cultural knowledge.
Experiments with animals demonstrated that without a practical OFC, rats don’t adapt their reward-seeking actions based on environment, and without the DH, they struggled to understand new context-dependent tasks quickly. These results provide deeper understanding into how the mind builds a mental image to understand difficult, context-dependent decisions.
Important Facts:
- OFC Role: The orbitofrontal brain enables context-based decision-making by regulating actions based on learned organizations.
- DH Function: The amygdala facilitates quick understanding of new context-dependent connections using previous knowledge.
- Mental Maps: Up, these mind regions construct cognitive maps that guide versatile, situation-appropriate actions.
Origin: UC Santa Barbara
Life can get difficult. There are so many things to consider. We do a great job of having an orbitofrontal cortex and a brain, which can assist us.
According to scientists at UC Santa Barbara, these brain regions collaborate to aid in sorting through situations where the significance of stimuli changes depending on the context.
” I would say that that’s the basis of cognition”, said UCSB scientist Ron Keiflin, whose test investigates the neural wires behind assessment and decision-making.
” That’s what makes us no behave like simple computers, constantly responding in the same manner to every signal. Our ability to understand that the interpretation of certain impulses is context-dependent is what gives us mobility, it is what allows us to behave in a situation-appropriate way”.
For example, he said, your smartphone may become calling, but whether you answer it will depend on a variety of factors, including where you are, what you’re doing, what occasion it is, who may be calling and other information.
It’s a second stimulus, Keiflin said,” but depending on the history conditions, it’s going to be processed separately and you might decide to engage with it in a unique way”.
The first to intrinsically assess the roles that the orbitofrontal brain and hippocampus play in this cultural disambiguation process was conducted by the study, which was published in the  journal Current Biology.
Making meaning ,
The front of the brain, above the eyes, is known as the orbitofrontal ( OFC). It’s associated with reward assessment, planning, decision-making and learning.
The lateral hippocampus ( DH) is located farther up, deeper into the mind, and it’s associated with geographical tracking and sequential memory.
Although research on the orbitofrontal brain and the brain has traditionally been done parallel, these two brain regions ‘ research has finally come to really similar conclusions, according to Keiflin.
The concept is that these two brain parts provide a” mental map” of the world’s structure, adding that it is not required to be just a geographical map.
You can use this chart to emotionally simulate the effects of your actions and determine the best course of action based on the direct framework of the environment.
This mental image is exactly what it is necessary to comprehend that the context affects the significance of a cue. Prior to this one, however, no reports had specifically examined the significance of these regions in terms of cultural disambiguation.
The researchers conducted an experiment in which animals were exposed to short audio signals presented in either a bright or dark environment ( the framework was changed by turning on or off a light bulb ) to understand how these two areas contributed to cultural disambiguation.
The auditory cues would sometimes lead to reward ( a little bit of sugar water ), but not always, other times the same cues would have no consequence, making them ambiguous predictors of rewards.
The rats would eventually learn that one auditory cue was only honored in the light-, but not the dark-, context, while the opposite was true for the other auditory cue. In other words, they would learn that the meaning of the cues was context-dependent.
When the rats approached and licked the sugar water cup in anticipation of the reward in one setting, or not, in the other, the researchers were aware of when the rats learned to discriminate between the two situations.
The researcher used” chemogenetics” — , a tool that allowed them to temporarily inactivate either of these structures during the task to understand how the orbitofrontal cortex and hippocampus were involved in this contextual disambiguation process.
They discovered that the OFC’s inactivation had significant impact on the task. Rats were unable to control their reward-seeking behavior and use the context’s current status to inform their prediction.
Surprisingly, DH was largely unavoidable in this task; rats were completely unaffected by the inactivation of their hippocampus, and they kept doing it with high accuracy.
Does this mean that the DH is not involved in contextual disambiguation?  , Not exactly. The researchers ‘ realization that knowledge is crucial for future learning as well as the recall of previous learning was a key moment in their lab.
” If I walked into an advanced math lecture, I would understand — and learn — very little,” Keiflin said.
However, someone with more mathematical understanding would be able to comprehend the text, which would greatly help students learn.
Applied to our task, we thought that prior knowledge of context-dependent relationships would facilitate learning of new context-dependent relationships, “he continued”. And indeed, this is exactly what we observed. ”  ,
It took more than four months of training for rats to learn the initial context-dependent pairs, he said, however, once equipped with a cognitive map of context-dependent relationships, rats could learn new context-dependent relationships in just a few days.
Using the same chemogenetic approach, researchers examined the role of the OFC and DH is this knowledge-accelerated form of learning. This time, they found that both the OFC and the DH were essential.
Without these structures, rats could not use their prior knowledge to make inferences about new context-dependent relationships.
The OFC and DH both contribute to contextual disambiguation, but in slightly different ways. DH is more crucial for using contextual knowledge to facilitate new contextual learning, whereas OFC is essential for using contextual knowledge to regulate behavior.
The fact that prior knowledge influences learning is well established in psychology and well known by educators, Keflin remarked.
A better neurobiological understanding of this rapid learning and context-dependent relationships is necessary because this method of learning likely represents a lot more than the human learning experience.
About this decision-making and neuroscience research news
Author: Daniel Smith
Source: UC Santa Barbara
Contact: Daniel Smith – UC Santa Barbara
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
By Ron Keiflin et al.,” Partially unrelated roles that the orbitofrontal cortex and the dorsal hippocampus play in context-dependent hierarchical associations.” Current Biology
Abstract
Partially unrelated roles that the orbitofrontal cortex and the dorsal hippocampus play in context-dependent hierarchical associations
Reward cues are often ambiguous, what is good in one context is not necessarily good in another. Animals form hierarchical associations where the context controls the retrieval of appropriate cue-evoked memories to address this ambiguity.
These hierarchical associations regulate cue-elicited behavior and influence subsequent learning, promoting the inference of context-dependency.
The orbitofrontal cortex ( OFC) and dorsal hippocampus ( DH) are both proposed to encode a” cognitive map “encompassing hierarchical, context-dependent associations.
However, OFC- and DH-specific contributions to the different functional properties of hierarchical associations remain controversial.
We demonstrate that the OFC is essential to both hierarchical association properties ( performance regulation and learning bias ) by using chemogenetic inactivation in rats. In contrast, DH’s role appears limited to the contextual learning bias conferred by hierarchical associations.
This work provides insights into the extended circuits that control the functional characteristics of hierarchical associations and establishes the OFC as a crucial orchestrator of hierarchical associations.
