Abstract
Adaptive cognitive-control involves a hierarchical cortico-striatal gating system that supports selective updating, maintenance, and retrieval of useful cognitive and motor information. Here, we developed a task that independently manipulates selective gating operations into working-memory (input gating), from working-memory (output gating), and of responses (motor gating) and tested the neural dynamics and computational principles that support them. Increases in gating demands, captured by gate switches, were expressed by distinct EEG correlates at each gating level that evolved dynamically in partially overlapping time windows. Further, categorical representations of specific maintained items and of motor responses could be decoded from EEG when the corresponding gate was switching, thereby linking gating operations to prioritization. Finally, gate switching at all levels was related to increases in the motor decision threshold as quantified by the drift diffusion model. Together these results support the notion that cognitive gating operations scaffold on top of mechanisms involved in motor gating.
Highlights
Optimal flexible behavior requires an agent to respond to incoming sensory events but to adaptively adjust action selection based on context, including previous events in memory [1]
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Using the reference-back-2 task, we tested the key properties of gating. That they are selective (“content-addressable”) and that principles of cognitive “actions” are scaffold on top of the motor gating operations
Summary
Optimal flexible behavior requires an agent to respond to incoming sensory events but to adaptively adjust action selection based on context, including previous events in memory [1]. While some events in memory need to be robustly maintained over time in the face of distracting interference, sometimes sensory events dictate that such memories should be disrupted and rapidly updated This challenge is referred to as the stability vs flexibility tradeoff [2,3,4] and highlights the need for a context-dependent control mechanism that selectively gates information into and out of working-memory (WM) to guide actions [5,6,7,8,9,10]. Despite this converging evidence for hierarchical PFC-BG gating interactions, the core assumption that response, input and output gating share computational properties–or how they unfold in time–has not been rigorously tested
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