title: Prefrontal Goal Codes Emerge as Latent States in Probabilistic Value Learning.
abstract: The prefrontal cortex (PFC) supports goal-directed actions and exerts cognitive control over behavior, but the underlying coding and mechanism are heavily debated. We present evidence for the role of goal coding in PFC from two converging perspectives: computational modeling and neuronal-level analysis of monkey data. We show that neural representations of prospective goals emerge by combining a categorization process that extracts relevant behavioral abstractions from the input data and a reward-driven process that selects candidate categories depending on their adaptive value; both forms of learning have a plausible neural implementation in PFC. Our analyses demonstrate a fundamental principle: goal coding represents an efficient solution to cognitive control problems, analogous to efficient coding principles in other (e.g., visual) brain areas. The novel analytical-computational approach is of general interest because it applies to a variety of neurophysiological studies.
authors.affiliation: National Research Council, Rome, Italy.|CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, France.
authors.forename: Ivilin
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Stoianov
authors.affiliation: University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Aldo
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Genovesio
authors.affiliation: National Research Council, Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Pezzulo
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D006040:Goals; D000882:Haplorhini; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D011337:Probability Learning; D011594:Psychometrics; D012201:Reward; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*