Topic: value-based decision making

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has long been considered critical for value-based decision making, but its precise role is a point of contention. One hypothesis is that OFC computes subjective value and drives economic choice [1]. A second hypothesis is that OFC represents a cognitive map or state space (i.e., a representation of the different states in a task and the transitions between them) [2]. We trained rats on a novel temporal wagering task with partially hidden states (blocks of trials with low or high rewards). Rats must determine how long to wait for a reward, providing an explicit be