TY - JOUR
T1 - Stable choice coding in rat frontal orienting fields across model-predicted changes of mind
AU - Boyd-Meredith, J. Tyler
AU - Piet, Alex T.
AU - Dennis, Emily Jane
AU - El Hady, Ahmed
AU - Brody, Carlos D.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank members of the Brody lab and Zachary Kilpatrick for useful conversations and feedback. T.B. acknowledges support by NIH grant T32 MH 65214-16. A.E.H. acknowledges support by NIH grant 1R21MH121889-01. E.J.D. is supported by an HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellowship and an HHMI-Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship. This work was supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (Grant # 542953) awarded to C.B., as well as NIH grant R01MH108358 awarded to C.B.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - During decision making in a changing environment, evidence that may guide the decision accumulates until the point of action. In the rat, provisional choice is thought to be represented in frontal orienting fields (FOF), but this has only been tested in static environments where provisional and final decisions are not easily dissociated. Here, we characterize the representation of accumulated evidence in the FOF of rats performing a recently developed dynamic evidence accumulation task, which induces changes in the provisional decision, referred to as “changes of mind”. We find that FOF encodes evidence throughout decision formation with a temporal gain modulation that rises until the period when the animal may need to act. Furthermore, reversals in FOF firing rates can be accounted for by changes of mind predicted using a model of the decision process fit only to behavioral data. Our results suggest that the FOF represents provisional decisions even in dynamic, uncertain environments, allowing for rapid motor execution when it is time to act.
AB - During decision making in a changing environment, evidence that may guide the decision accumulates until the point of action. In the rat, provisional choice is thought to be represented in frontal orienting fields (FOF), but this has only been tested in static environments where provisional and final decisions are not easily dissociated. Here, we characterize the representation of accumulated evidence in the FOF of rats performing a recently developed dynamic evidence accumulation task, which induces changes in the provisional decision, referred to as “changes of mind”. We find that FOF encodes evidence throughout decision formation with a temporal gain modulation that rises until the period when the animal may need to act. Furthermore, reversals in FOF firing rates can be accounted for by changes of mind predicted using a model of the decision process fit only to behavioral data. Our results suggest that the FOF represents provisional decisions even in dynamic, uncertain environments, allowing for rapid motor execution when it is time to act.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-022-30736-3
DO - 10.1038/s41467-022-30736-3
M3 - Article
C2 - 35688813
AN - SCOPUS:85131789545
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 13
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 3235
ER -