Hierarchical reasoning by neural circuits in the frontal cortex
Name
MS_MJ_combined.pdf
Size
10.09 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d9f305f9d0812cadaccd6e669a4e3718
Author(s)
Sarafyazd, Morteza
Jazayeri, Mehrdad
Date Issued
May 2019
Journal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Sarafyazd, Morteza and Mehrdad Jazayeri. "Hierarchical reasoning by neural circuits in the frontal cortex." Science 364, 6441 (May 2019): eaav8911 © 2019 The Authors
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Humans process information hierarchically. In the presence of hierarchies, sources of failures are ambiguous. Humans resolve this ambiguity by assessing their confidence after one or more attempts. To understand the neural basis of this reasoning strategy, we recorded from dorsomedial frontal cortex (DMFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of monkeys in a task in which negative outcomes were caused either by misjudging the stimulus or by a covert switch between two stimulus-response contingency rules. We found that both areas harbored a representation of evidence supporting a rule switch. Additional perturbation experiments revealed that ACC functioned downstream of DMFC and was directly and specifically involved in inferring covert rule switches. These results reveal the computational principles of hierarchical reasoning, as implemented by cortical circuits.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aav8911
