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Poster B3 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Localised and stable codes for goal and direction mix with a distributed control signal during multi-step spatial inference in monkey frontal cortex
Jascha Achterberg1,2,3 (), Valentina Mione2, Mark Buckley1, John Duncan2; 1University of Oxford, 2University of Cambridge, 3Intel Labs
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) of primates has long been associated with a diverse set of cognitive control and executive functions, governing decision making in complex situations. Neural recordings of isolated regions in PFC have revealed a similarly diverse set of neural codes, showing varying degrees of stability and temporal generalizability across studies, and hence leaving open the question of when and where PFC relies on each specific coding scheme. Here we use a novel multi-step maze task and large-scale recording arrays to record from 6 sub-regions of frontal cortex (FC) during complex planning behavior. We find that across regions FC seems to combine stable and localized codes with temporally-confined but spatially distributed codes. Instead of relying on one specific code, a multiplexed set of diverse codes is used to generate complex cognition.
Keywords: frontal cortex population codes multiplexed codes goal-directed behavior