Topic: value-guided decision making

The cognitive ability to go beyond the present to consider alternative possibilities, such as potential futures and counterfactual pasts, can support adaptive decision making. However, in complex and changing real-world environments, there are many possible alternatives. Whether and how the brain can select among these to represent alternatives that meet current cognitive demands remains unknown. A candidate process for internally representing alternatives is the population activity of spatially-tuned hippocampal neurons that not only represent an animal’s actual location during locomotion, bu