Topic: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Different prefrontal areas contribute in distinctly different ways to rule-guided behaviour in the context of a Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) analog for macaques. For example, causal evidence from circumscribed lesions in NHPs reveals that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is necessary to maintain a reinforced abstract rule in working memory, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is needed to rapidly update representations of rule value, and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays a key role in cognitive control and integrating information for correct and incorrect trials over recent outcomes

A central issue in reinforcement learning (RL) is the ‘curse-of-dimensionality’, arising when the degrees-of-freedom are much larger than the number of training samples. In such circumstances, the learning process becomes too slow to be plausible. In the brain, higher cognitive functions (such as abstraction or metacognition) may be part of the solution by generating low dimensional representations on which RL can operate. In this talk I will discuss a series of studies in which we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational modeling to investigate the neuro-computation

Perceptual decision-making involves interpreting sensory information to guide actions. Incoming sensory information must often be assessed in the context of other relevant information held in working memory. Despite this interdependence, the neural basis of working memory and perceptual decision-making have largely been studied separately. Thus, how the brain flexibly combines sensory information with information in memory to form decisions remains unknown. To study this interaction, we developed a novel behavioral task in which monkeys hold a set of color images in working memory as context,