HIERARCHICAL GOAL REPRESENTATIONS WITHIN PREFRONTAL SUBREGIONS FOR NAVIGATION

Navigation to distant goals is often achieved by decomposing behavior into sequential segments separated by intermediate subgoals. Although both humans and rodents rely on subgoal-targeting strategies to reach final destinations (Grossman et al., 2025; Shamash et al., 2021), how the brain maintains final goal information while flexibly updating subgoals remains unclear. Previous work suggests that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) encode navigational goals (Basu et al., 2021; Hok et al., 2005), yet their distinct and coordinated roles are not well understood.
To address this, we designed a navigation task in which animals alternated between two final goals via a shared intermediate subgoal. Neural recordings revealed dissociable goal representations across prefrontal regions. OFC neurons encoded the immediate destination of each navigation segment, consistent with a role in representing ongoing journey targets, including subgoals. In contrast, mPFC neurons maintained the final-goal representation throughout subgoal-directed journeys.
Consistent with this observation, dimensionality reduction of mPFC population activity revealed a continuous ring-shaped manifold spanning the entire trial, including subgoal-directed segments. By contrast, OFC population activity formed two distinct ring manifolds, each corresponding to an individual subgoal- or final-goal directed segment.
Optogenetic perturbations further demonstrated functional dissociation. Transient disruption of OFC activity impaired the immediate goal targeting within individual segments, whereas mPFC perturbation at any point during the trial disrupted accurate final goal choice.
Together, these results reveal a hierarchical organization of navigational goal representations within the prefrontal cortex, in which mPFC maintains overarching final goals while OFC dynamically updates immediate subgoals.