frontal eye field

NMC4 Short Talk: Transient neuronal suppression for exploitation of new sensory evidence

Decision-making in noisy environments with constant sensory evidence involves integrating sequentially-sampled evidence, a strategy formalized by diffusion models which is supported by decades behavioral and neural findings. By contrast, it is unknown whether this strategy is also used during decision-making when the underlying sensory evidence is expected to change. Here, we trained monkeys to identify the dominant color of a dynamically refreshed checkerboard pattern that doesn't become informative until after a variable delay. Animals' behavioral responses were briefly suppressed after an abrupt change in evidence, and many neurons in the frontal eye field displayed a corresponding dip in activity at this time, similar to the dip frequently observed after stimulus onset. Generalized drift-diffusion models revealed that behavior and neural activity were consistent with a brief suppression of motor output without a change in evidence accumulation itself, in contrast to the popular belief that evidence accumulation is paused or reset. These results suggest that a brief interruption in motor preparation is an important strategy for dealing with changing evidence during perceptual decision making.

Covert spatial attention-based neurofeedback changes the neuronal population code of the frontal eye fields in an oscillatory manner: A non-human primate study

Distinct neuronal states encode task identity in frontal eye field and interact with its core spatial properties

The structure of neuronal information multiplexing in the frontal eye field accounts for both neuronal and behavioral variability