Topic: environmental states

Both humans and monkeys are skillful at learning to form representations of latent states of their environments, those that must be inferred from observations. The neural circuits that govern this sophisticated skill include the orbitofrontal cortex, hippocampus, amygdala and other regions. Whether these regions merely store representations of latent states or actively construct them remains to be described. Further, if they are constructed, the mechanism for forming them is unknown. Here, we report on monkeys playing a simplified version of the game battleship, designed to investigate learnin