Topic: behavioral strategy

Interactions across the frontal cortex are critical for cognition. Animal studies suggest a role for mediodorsal thalamus (MD) in these interactions, but the computations performed and direct relevance to human reasoning are unclear. Here, inspired by animal work, we build a neural model to derive computational insights and find consistent evidence in fMRI data of humans performing the same probabilistic reversal learning task. We used a reservoir recurrent neural network as a model of the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and found that adding an MD layer with multiplicative inputs to d

The ability to learn associations between sensory stimuli, actions and outcomes is crucial for adaptive perceptual decision-making. A key brain area supporting this ability is the striatum, which receives extensive signals from several cortical areas. These cortico-striatal pathways are shaped by two neuromodulators, dopamine and acetylcholine, whose levels are among the highest in the brain. Yet, how dopamine and acetylcholine interact to facilitate adaptive perceptual decision-making is unclear. To address this question, we characterized dopamine and acetylcholine release in the dorsolateral