Reward acts as a signal to control delay-period activity in delayed-response tasks.
Prefrontal delay-period activity represents a neural mechanism for the active maintenance of information and needs to be controlled by some signal to appropriately operate working memory. To examine whether reward-delivery acts as this signal, the effects of delay-period activity in response to unexpected reward-delivery were examined by analyzing single-neuron activity recorded in the primate dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Among neurons that showed delay-period activity, 34% showed inhibition of this activity in response to unexpected reward-delivery. The delay-period activity of these neurons was affected by the expectation of reward-delivery. The strength of the reward signal in controlling the delay-period activity is related to the strength of the effect of reward information on the delay-period activity. These results indicate that reward-delivery acts as a signal to control delay-period activity.
Department of Occupational Therapy, School of Health Science, Sapporo Medical University, Sapporo, Japan.
Satoe
S
Ichihara-Takeda
Kazuyoshi
K
Takeda
Shintaro
S
Funahashi
D000200:Action Potentials; D000818:Animals; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D009433:Neural Inhibition; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012201:Reward; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology