Topic: opponent inhibition

Many behaviors demand a balance between exploitation, which requires reliability, and exploration, which involves flexibility. In cortical circuits, much work has emphasized how attractor dynamics generate reliable behavior through the convergence of a network to specialized activity patterns for specific decisions and actions1. Other work has emphasized how cortical activity exhibits variability across trials of a behavior, which could in principle support flexibility in actions2. Here, through multi-area calcium imaging and recurrent neural network models, we propose that cortical activity f