日本RIKEN脑科学研究中心Joshua P. Johansen团队在研究中取得进展。他们提出了情绪推理内部模型的前额叶编码。该研究于2025年5月14日发表于国际一流学术期刊《自然》杂志上。

在这里，该课题组报告了啮齿动物背内侧前额叶皮层（dmPFC）中的神经元通过将环境中的感官刺激与厌恶事件联系起来，编码了一种灵活的情绪内部模型，无论它们是否直接或间接与该体验相关。这些表征通过多步编码机制形成，涉及支持推理的dmPFC细胞的招募和稳定。尽管dmPFC群体活动编码所有显著的关联，但投射到杏仁核的dmPFC神经元特异性地代表并需要表达推断的关联。总之，这些发现揭示了情绪的内部模型是如何在dmPFC中编码的，以调节皮层下系统来回忆推断的情绪记忆。

据介绍，调节情绪的大脑系统的一个关键功能是学会预测不愉快的经历。虽然生物体很容易将感觉刺激与厌恶结果联系起来，但高阶形式的情绪学习和记忆需要推断，将直接经历的厌恶事件周围的环境推断为其他间接相关的感觉模式，而这些模式不是原始体验的一部分。这种类型的学习需要情绪的内部模型，灵活地跟踪直接体验和推断的厌恶联想。虽然简单形式的厌恶学习的大脑机制已经在杏仁核等区域得到了很好的研究，但大脑是否以及如何形成和表现情感相关关联的内部模型尚不清楚。

附：英文原文

Title: Prefrontal encoding of an internal model for emotional inference

Author: Gu, Xiaowei, Johansen, Joshua P.

Issue&Volume: 2025-05-14

Abstract: A key function of brain systems mediating emotion is to learn to anticipate unpleasant experiences. Although organisms readily associate sensory stimuli with aversive outcomes, higher-order forms of emotional learning and memory require inference to extrapolate the circumstances surrounding directly experienced aversive events to other indirectly related sensory patterns that were not part of the original experience. This type of learning requires internal models of emotion, which flexibly track directly experienced and inferred aversive associations. Although the brain mechanisms of simple forms of aversive learning have been well studied in areas such as the amygdala1,2,3,4, whether and how the brain forms and represents internal models of emotionally relevant associations are not known5. Here we report that neurons in the rodent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) encode a flexible internal model of emotion by linking sensory stimuli in the environment with aversive events, whether they were directly or indirectly associated with that experience. These representations form through a multi-step encoding mechanism involving recruitment and stabilization of dmPFC cells that support inference. Although dmPFC population activity encodes all salient associations, dmPFC neurons projecting to the amygdala specifically represent and are required to express inferred associations. Together, these findings reveal how internal models of emotion are encoded in the dmPFC to regulate subcortical systems for recall of inferred emotional memories.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09001-2

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09001-2