Topic: dynamic foraging task

Flexible decision making is vital for survival. Animals must continuously evaluate their environment, making choices to maximize future gains. To facilitate decision making, multiple brain regions represent values of choice options and update them based on environmental interactions, connecting past experiences with future plans. Yet, the neural mechanisms generating these representations remain unclear. Here, we hypothesize that the claustrum, a subcortical nucleus highly interconnected with the neocortex, encodes decision variables and aids in sustaining their representations in cerebral cor

Cognitive flexibility plays a key role in ensuring an individual's survival. The prefrontal cortex and striatum are both essential to cognitive flexibility but competing theories debate which structure among these two leads the role in detecting and representing new circumstances for a change, giving largely opposing predictions on neural activities in the prefrontal cortex and striatum during flexible behavior. We trained head-restrained mice to perform an action-outcome based dynamic foraging task and simultaneously recorded single-neuron activities in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)