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DECISION-MAKING

Same lesson, varied choices by frontal cortex

Nature Neuroscience volume 21, pages 1648–1650 (2018)Cite this article

In an unfamiliar situation, animals display variable choice behavior. Based on computational modeling and empirical data, a new study suggests that the variability in decision-making across individuals is driven by differences in internal neural dynamics in the medial frontal cortex.

The goal of many neural circuits is to perform a behavioral function. To achieve this goal, a myriad of circuit configurations may be possible and equally up to task. For example, in the stomatogastric ganglion, a simple circuit of about thirty neurons, it was estimated that hundreds of thousands of disparate implementations of the network, each with distinct values for synapse strengths and neuron properties, are capable of generating the same desired motor output1. While the many implementations are seemingly indistinguishable in terms of learned outputs, what if they have to face an unfamiliar situation and perform a behavioral function beyond the initial goal? A new study in this issue of Nature Neuroscience asks this question in the context of decision-making. The authors show that rats and computational models displayed diverse choice behavior when tested on unfamiliar stimuli and that this behavioral variability across individuals relates to the neural activity dynamics in the medial frontal cortex2.

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Fig. 1: Internal neural dynamics in the medial frontal cortex as a determinant of choice behavior.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH112750 and R21 MH118596) and by a Kavli Institute for Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA

    Huriye Atilgan & Alex C. Kwan

  2. Department of Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA

    Alex C. Kwan

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  1. Huriye Atilgan
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  2. Alex C. Kwan
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Correspondence to Alex C. Kwan.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Atilgan, H., Kwan, A.C. Same lesson, varied choices by frontal cortex. Nat Neurosci 21, 1648–1650 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0282-2

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