Causal evidence of a line attractor encoding an affective state

Abstract

Copyright and License

© The Author(s)

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Acknowledgement

We thank B. Yang for help in miniscope imaging and initial construct of the ChRmine plasmid and for his feedback; I. Landau and H. Inagaki for feedback; T. Karigo for help in behavioural experiments; J.-S. Kim for help in stereotaxic surgeries and histology; X. Da for help in histology; Y. Huang for help with genotyping and maxi-prep; the members of the Techlab at Caltech for help with 3D printing; D. Wagenaar for help with hardware; Y. Jung for help securing the funds for the 2P-SLM set-up; staff at Bruker, and especially S. Trier, T. Fothergill and E. Cho, for their help in establishing and maintaining the 2P-SLM set-up; the former Anderson laboratory members B. Weissbourd and A. Kennedy for initial feedback on this work; the current Anderson laboratory members for continuous feedback; the Caltech OLAR staff and especially K. Lee for animal care; and C. Chiu, G. Mancuso and L. Chavarria for laboratory management and administrative assistance. D.J.A. is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This work was supported by grants from the NIH (RO1MH112593, RO1MH123612 and RO1NS123916) and by the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain. A.N. is supported by a National Science Scholarship from the Agency of Science, Technology and Research, Singapore; and A.V. by a fellowship from the Human Frontiers Science Program and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Funding

D.J.A. is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This work was supported by grants from the NIH (RO1MH112593, RO1MH123612 and RO1NS123916) and by the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain. A.N. is supported by a National Science Scholarship from the Agency of Science, Technology and Research, Singapore; and A.V. by a fellowship from the Human Frontiers Science Program and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Contributions

These authors contributed equally: Amit Vinograd, Aditya Nair

A.V., A.N. and D.J.A. designed the study and wrote the manuscript, with critical input from S.W.L. A.N. and A.V. performed data analysis and data collection with help from J.H.K.

Data Availability

Source data for this Article have been deposited in the DANDI repository with the accession code 001037.

Code Availability

Code for fitting models is available at GitHub (https://github.com/lindermanlab/ssm).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Errata

15 September 2025: This paper was originally published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, CC-BY-NC-ND, © The Author(s). It is now available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, CC-BY, © The Author(s). The error has been corrected in the online version of the article.

Supplemental Material

Extended Data Fig. 1 Shared line attractor dynamics in freely behaving mice engaging in or observing aggression

Extended Data Fig. 2 Flow fields from miniscope experiments during engagement and observation of aggression

Extended Data Fig. 3 Comparing neuronal activity of x₁ neurons during engaging vs. observing aggression

Extended Data Fig. 4 Single cell comparison of integration neurons across conditions

Extended Data Fig. 5 Readouts of behaviour and motion in head-fixed mice

Extended Data Fig. 6 Controls for off-target effects of 2P photoactivation

Extended Data Fig. 7 Spatial clustering of neurons and activity comparison

Extended Data Fig. 8 Characterization of line attractor properties

Extended Data Fig. 9 Examination of finite nature and stability of line attractor

Extended Data Fig. 10 Impact of functional connectivity measurements on non-targeted neurons

Extended Data Fig. 11 Deriving network time constant for model simulations

Extended Data Fig. 12 Additional quantifications of the correlation between functional connectivity and the stability of the decay and ramp

Reporting Summary