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Authors & Affiliations
Paul Anderson, Mirjam Lambourne, Romana Hauer, Thomas Klausberger
Abstract
Effective decision-making requires not just resolving difficult choices but evaluating the quality of decisions once they are made. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a key role in decision-making and has been shown to perform metacognitive computations such as post-decision confidence, i.e. the probability of being correct given the subjective evidence. How and where OFC calculations of decision confidence are output to other cortical and sub-cortical circuits is as yet unclear.Here we examined the activity of neurons in the OFC of rats, while they were performing an auditory choice task with a post-decision time investment option. After making their perceptual decision, animals had to wait for reward delivery delayed by a pseudo-random period. The time animals were willing to invest into waiting for an uncertain reward before abandoning their choice served as a post-decision measure of confidence.We implemented a detailed anatomical and functional profiling of OFC neurons while animals were engaged in this task. High-density electrophysiology recordings captured the activity of OFC neurons. Viral tracing enabled the identification of multiple downstream targets of OFC projection neurons, which were then the focus of targeted optotagging experiments. This approach allowed us to capture detailed functional activity of hundreds of OFC neurons with distinctive activity profiles that reflect different aspects of the waiting period commitment. Combined with multi-site optotagging we can confirm individual neurons projection targets. The firing patterns of identified cells with projections to different sub-cortical regions reveal how distinct types of OFC neuron contribute to decision-making and confidence.