Topic: total action values

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