Topic: cognitive control

Animals constantly decide how to allocate mental resources to thrive in their environments. Managing learning is a key challenge, and recent experiments show that animals often incur attentional costs for the potential of greater future rewards, or disengage when a task appears unlearnable, exhibiting nuanced cognitive control over learning. However, optimizing time-dependent control requires complex computations, including integrating an agent's learning dynamics and predicting how control affects future rewards. Here, we present a solution for optimal control of integrated non-linear learnin

The ability to withhold a response and appropriately time one’s actions is an essential component of goal-directed behavior. Aspects of such cognitive control in rodents are supported by the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The mPFC and its subareas are a site of distinct delay-related activity during motor preparation. However, how mPFC integrates relevant information and exercises the control over behavioral responses remains incompletely understood. Here we characterized local field potentials (LFPs) within mPFC with a focus on the detection of beta bursts – discrete oscillatory events in t