Prefrontal neural dynamics for behavioral decisions and attentional control
ABSTRACTComplex neural dynamics in the prefrontal cortex contribute to context-dependent decisions and attentional competition. To analyze these dynamics, we apply demixed principal component analysis to activity of a primate prefrontal cell sample recorded in a cued target detection task. The results track dynamics of cue and object coding, feeding into movements along a target present-absent decision axis in a low-dimensional subspace of population activity. For a single stimulus, object and cue coding are seen mainly in the contralateral hemisphere. Later, a developing decision code in both hemispheres may reflect interhemispheric communication. With a target in one hemifield and a competing distractor in the other, each hemisphere initially encodes the contralateral object, but finally, decision coding is dominated by the task-relevant target. Tracking complex neural events in a low-dimensional activity subspace illuminates information flow towards task-appropriate behavior, unravelling mechanisms of prefrontal computation.