What to do and how

Abstract

Decisions can differ depending on the context that surrounds them. Analyses of the prefrontal cortex region of the monkey brain indicate that a dynamical process at the neuronal population level controls this behaviour. See Article p.78 The neurons of the primate prefrontal cortex represent multiple aspects of sensory stimuli and have task-dependent, time-varying responses. How these complex responses represent relevant aspects of their inputs or contribute to behaviour in different contexts remains unclear. Valerio Mante et al. show here that when monkeys perform a context-dependent sensorimotor task, task-relevant and task-irrelevant signals are intermingled in single units of the prefrontal cortex, but are readily understood in the framework of a dynamical process unfolding at the level of the population. A recurrently connected neural network model reproduces key features of the data and suggests a novel mechanism for selection and integration of task-relevant evidence towards a decision.