ePoster

Composition of neural dynamics underlies distinct policy for navigation

Sangkyu Son, Benjamin Hayden, Maya Wang, Seng Bum Michael Yoo
COSYNE 2025(2025)
Montreal, Canada

Conference

COSYNE 2025

Montreal, Canada

Resources

Authors & Affiliations

Sangkyu Son, Benjamin Hayden, Maya Wang, Seng Bum Michael Yoo

Abstract

When navigating a familiar environment, your behavior may vary depending on your goals. For example, you might take a detour to check out a restaurant you have been curious about, but if you're in a rush, you will opt for the shortest route. Our research focuses on how the brain's neural population, particularly in regions associated with goal-directed behavior (the orbitofrontal cortex, OFC) and navigation (the retrosplenial cortex, RSC), orchestrates the transition between competing goals during navigation. To explore this, we designed a virtual-reality maze task for two Rhesus monkeys, where they had to search for fixed reward locations. Throughout the task, we recorded neural signals from the RSC and OFC. Using a hidden Markov model (HMM), we identified two distinct behavioral strategies the monkeys used during navigation: one aimed at maximizing information collection (surveying state) and the other focused on maximizing rewards (deliberation state). We hypothesize that each goal would function like separate fixed-point attractors, and a mixture of each behavioral goal shown in choice level would exhibit mixed effects of two distinct fixed-point attractors. However, instead of two separate attractors in the flow field of neural dynamics, we found the composition of two different dynamics for a single fixed-point attractor explained the two seemingly distinct goals. Altogether, our results show that control of a mixture of dynamics underlies the seemingly distinct action policy.

Unique ID: cosyne-25/composition-neural-dynamics-underlies-b3887468