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Frontal circuit specialisations for decision making
Author(s) -
Hunt Laurence T.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/ejn.15236
Subject(s) - neuroscience , dorsolateral prefrontal cortex , prefrontal cortex , anterior cingulate cortex , psychology , orbitofrontal cortex , biological neural network , cognitive psychology , neural correlates of consciousness , neurophysiology , cognition
Abstract There is widespread consensus that distributed circuits across prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex (PFC/ACC) are critical for reward‐based decision making. The circuit specialisations of these areas in primates were likely shaped by their foraging niche, in which decision making is typically sequential, attention‐guided and temporally extended. Here, I argue that in humans and other primates, PFC/ACC circuits are functionally specialised in two ways. First, microcircuits found across PFC/ACC are highly recurrent in nature and have synaptic properties that support persistent activity across temporally extended cognitive tasks. These properties provide the basis of a computational account of time‐varying neural activity within PFC/ACC as a decision is being made. Second, the macrocircuit connections (to other brain areas) differ between distinct PFC/ACC cytoarchitectonic subregions. This variation in macrocircuit connections explains why PFC/ACC subregions make unique contributions to reward‐based decision tasks and how these contributions are shaped by attention. They predict dissociable neural representations to emerge in orbitofrontal, anterior cingulate and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during sequential attention‐guided choice, as recently confirmed in neurophysiological recordings.