Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

Behaviour is often structured around goals, but how we form neural representations of our goals remains unclear. To investigate goal coding in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), we recorded single unit activity as mice navigated to visually cued goal locations in a set of complex mazes. mPFC activity robustly differentiated between goals at the time animals reached goal locations and obtained reward, but strikingly not at the start of navigation when goals were cued. Representation similarity analysis (RSA) of these reward-time goal representations indicated that goals close in Euclidean space had more similar representations, but also that the structure of the maze influenced goals representations in a consistent way across subjects.