Topic: task context

Neural circuits adapt their computations to perform cognitive functions within and across tasks. These adaptations are vital for decision making, which often requires the integration of past information and present context to generate appropriate behaviors. Neurons in association cortices exhibit selective activity for task-relevant signals such as current and past choices and outcomes, yet how such selectivity is modulated by the task context is unclear. Interestingly, neuronal activity encodes time or epoch within the task as strongly as conventional task variables. Here we examined the intr

The process of switching between tasks is cognitively taxing, and gives rise to a task switching cost (TSC), an increase in reaction time immediately after switching [1]. While robust in humans, the presence of TSC in other animals is debated, being absent from some species entirely, thus necessitating study in humans [2,3]. The neurophysiological basis of TSC is also debated, with two competing explanations involving reconfiguration of medial frontal cortical (MFC) activity for the current task, or lack of inhibition of the previous task. To disambiguate between these explanations, we conduct

Habits and goal-directed behaviour are often viewed as opposite extremes in the spectrum of human behaviour. However, some theoretical accounts hypothesize that the initiation of habits may underlie goal-directed control, as habits often contribute to the achievement of specific goals. Here, we test this hypothesis by using a task that concurrently measures habitual and goal-directed behaviour (Frölich et al., Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16 (2023)), see Figure. In this task, participants implicitly learn a hidden repeating action sequence over two days while instructed to maximize their perform